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XBox (Games) Games

Starfield's 1,000 Planets May Be One Giant Leap for Game Design 106

Posted by msmash from the remarkable-titles dept.
The stakes are high for Bethesda's newest role-playing game. Microsoft needs an Xbox hit, and players are hungry for an expansive and satisfying space adventure. From a report: Starfield almost immediately nudges its players to the edges of the cosmos. In the opening hours of the role-playing video game, it's possible to land your spaceship on Earth's moon or zip 16 light-years to Alpha Centauri. When you open your map and zoom out from a planet, you can behold its surrounding solar system; zoom out again, and you're scrolling past luminous stars and the mysterious worlds that orbit them. That sprawling celestial journey within Starfield, developed by Bethesda Game Studios, reveals both the tremendous potential and the monumental challenge of an open-world space adventure. Bethesda has hyped an expansive single-player campaign with 1,000 explorable planets. And expectations around the game, officially releasing on Sept. 6 after a 10-month delay, are nearly as vast.

It's the first new universe in 25 years for Bethesda, known for the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series. It's also a high-stakes moment for Microsoft, which makes the Xbox and has long faced criticism that it produces fewer hit games than its console rivals, Sony and Nintendo. To compete, Microsoft went on a spending spree, acquiring Bethesda's parent company in 2020 and agreeing to purchase Activision Blizzard in 2022, a $69 billion bet that is being challenged by regulators. Now Bethesda must deliver. Known for letting players navigate competing factions and undertake eccentric quests, the studio hopes Starfield will dazzle those clamoring for engaging encounters with alien life-forms or space mercenaries as well as a sense of boundless exploration.
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Starfield's 1,000 Planets May Be One Giant Leap for Game Design More

Starfield's 1,000 Planets May Be One Giant Leap for Game Design

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  • I hate to be that guy. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Major_Disorder ( 5019363 ) on Thursday August 31, 2023 @02:27PM (#63812802)
    Alpha Centauri is not 16 light-years away.
    4.3 LY IIRC

  • EVE Online? (Score:3)

    by haruchai ( 17472 ) on Thursday August 31, 2023 @02:28PM (#63812804)

    is 20 years old. What does Starfield offer that EVE doesn't?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by celeb8 ( 682138 )
      Less "direct economic warfare" (as a great man once said) and more direct control of your spaceship? At least thats the hope...

    • Re:EVE Online? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Thursday August 31, 2023 @02:35PM (#63812834) Homepage
      It is single player, so completely different in that the game world can't be taken over by cheaters, trolls, or griefers.

      • Re:EVE Online? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 ) on Thursday August 31, 2023 @02:45PM (#63812862)
        And thank god for that. I despise the fact that it seems like EVERYTHING released these days insists on trying to incorporate multi-player. I spend all day dealing with people, why would I want to do it at home too?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Calydor ( 739835 )

          The type of multiplayer matters, too. I'm fine with a 'potentially co-op' game when I'm trying to unwind, I'm not fine with 'forced PVP whether you go to the bathroom or not'.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by myowntrueself ( 607117 )

      is 20 years old. What does Starfield offer that EVE doesn't?

      If it isn't set in fluidic space, where when you stop applying thrust you come to a stop.
      If it has travel at high speeds and combat over long distances, where a 'cruise missile' doesn't have a range of just 100km.
      Eve Online is just science garbage.

      • Eve Online is just science garbage.

        Yes, none of these fictional video games truly represent the interstellar space vehicles. . . that no human has. For the sake of gameplay, sometimes physics have to be ignored. In other news, no one can actually cast a healing spell to help a teammate and that death is not reversible by a resurrection spell.

        • Well obviously. You have to use a phoenix down.

        • We shouldn't assume that it's impossible to have fun gameplay with newtonian/relativistic physics. If you have aircraft physics then why not you make a game with airplanes instead? Insane distances and lack of friction is one of things that makes space new and interesting frontier to explore.

          • We shouldn't assume that it's impossible to have fun gameplay with newtonian/relativistic physics. If you have aircraft physics then why not you make a game with airplanes instead? Insane distances and lack of friction is one of things that makes space new and interesting frontier to explore.

            of course its possible to have fun. In Eve Online, especially if you're a masochist or a sadist.

          • There could be fun games that have more realistic physics; however, the focus of Eve Online would probably not be suited to more realistic physics. It is designed for player vs player space battles more than realistic space exploration. It would not be the only game hampered if it was more realistic. Call of Duty would not be as playable if battle wounds required weeks of recuperation.
            • It's possible to make gameplay more abstract, like you're almost never controlling ship manually but choosing destination or orbit and flight computer does everything else. For this approach it matters little which physics universe has. Could also work well with rpg game such as Eve, like character skills could determine how good are you at coming up with trajectories both for travel and combat.

              • Could also work well with rpg game such as Eve, like character skills could determine how good are you at coming up with trajectories both for travel and combat.

                Maybe for single player RPG games. Massively multiplayer online RPG computers would find it difficult to correctly compute the changing trajectories of thousands of independent individual players as well as all the tens of thousands of objects like missiles in the game during a space battle.

                • The thing is newtonian is even simpler mathematically because you don't need to apply friction. Only its issue is that its implications are hard to deal with for people who live on surface of Earth. But modern hardware could handle relativistic too, if needed.

          • Thinking of spaceflight / combat games with decent Newtonian physics, Warhead from 1990 did that pretty well, although it's been a long time since I played it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • Eve Online is just science garbage.

          Yes, none of these fictional video games truly represent the interstellar space vehicles. . . that no human has. For the sake of gameplay, sometimes physics have to be ignored. In other news, no one can actually cast a healing spell to help a teammate and that death is not reversible by a resurrection spell.

          Eve Online is the most egregiously rubbish 'space simulation' that I ever encountered. It doesn't even bother trying to have physics.

          • Please cite where Eve Online has EVER claimed to be a space simulator. It has always claimed to be a MMORPG set in space. Your argument is as silly as claiming Dungeons and Dragons games are not historically accurate to the Middle Ages.

    • Re:EVE Online? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by snowshovelboy ( 242280 ) on Thursday August 31, 2023 @02:52PM (#63812890)

      What does Starfield offer that EVE doesn't?

      The ability to pause the game.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Or for that matter, Elite.

      Elite II: Frontier in particular had a lot of planets that you could explore. Okay, the graphics were very basic, but procedural generation of environments was well established back then.

    • What does Starfield offer that EVE doesn't?

      In saying that it is clear you either don't play EVE or have no idea what Starfield is. The games couldn't be more difference. Comparing them just "because spaaaace" is just silly.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by haruchai ( 17472 )

        Hence the question, to which you didn't provide a useful answer, unlike some others who didn't make any assumptions

    • Been a while since I've played Eve, but can you walk around on any of the planets? I remember there being a lot of systems though, but really you could just dock with a station and then it was all menus. What Starfield is supposedly promising is fully fleshed out planets you can walk around on. Time will tell if it is actually compelling gameplay, or if they're the rather empty procedurally generated worlds that No Man's Sky had.

  • Don't get your hopes up (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kiddo 9000 ( 5893452 ) on Thursday August 31, 2023 @02:29PM (#63812808)
    Knowing Bethesda and the recent leak that showed that planets have limited boundaries, I'm willing to bet the Creation engine is still too shitty to really pull this off, and they are just teleporting you between different levels that are all themed to look the same, like all their previous games where buildings never had real interiors. Clever trick, but not very impressive when games like Elite Dangerous exist.

    • Re:Don't get your hopes up (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Thursday August 31, 2023 @03:08PM (#63812932)

      That's the problem. Elite has around 400 billion star systems and who knows how many planets and moons. They're all procedurally generated though, so you can have a great time exploring for interesting features the generator makes, but there's not much story.

      A thousand systems isn't impressive numerically. What matters is how much content they've put into them.

      • They're all procedurally generated though, so you can have a great time exploring for interesting features the generator makes

        Yes, you can, but since you can only land on worlds with little to no atmosphere and so almost no life it does not make for a very exciting time after the first hundred or so. The most exciting thing is being able to take epic voyages to the far side of the galaxy. If the Odyssey expansion had added planets with life and atmospheres ED would be a much more exciting game than a great space simulator with a second-rate first-person shooter bolted on the side.

      • This is so true. Elite could have been a great game if they'd have just finished it. The state it was left in is very sad.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      The whole "world dynamically loads around you as you move" has been built as a technology for what, a decade at least?

  • Buy the competition (Score:3)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Thursday August 31, 2023 @02:30PM (#63812810) Homepage
    Can't compete? Buy the competition. Long past time for antitrust regulation to kick in...

    • In what way is MS leveraging their Windows monopoly to stifle competition? Cause that's how anti-trust law actually works.

      • They have acquired multiple developers that had games in development as cross-platform titles. These would have offered consumers a choice of where to play the games, allowing normal market forces to encourage targeting consumer preferences rather than attempting to dictate them. Instead, the edict came down that these would not be released for competing consoles following the acquisition - using Microsoft's deep coffers to stifle competition. It's a subtle topic because there certainly have always been

        • Microsoft is not the big monopoly position company in console gaming. Not even close. They are a distant third to Sony and Nintendo. Anti-trust does not apply to third ranked losers.

          • Xbox is Microsoft and Microsoft aren't third ranked losers in desktop business software. Anti-trust is as much about not leveraging your market dominating position to gain an unreasonable advantage in another industry as well as just preventing competition in your own niche. Normally the loser wouldn't be able to buy studios and shut out competitors due to not having the money to do so, this is the exception where the loser is rich beyond measure and can shit up the industry they are losing in just to see i

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

          They have acquired multiple developers that had games in development as cross-platform titles.

          One thing that came out of the Sony Activision lawsuit is that the *only* reason Microsoft bought Bethesda is because Sony was approaching them to make Starfield a Playstation exclusive. This came out not only from Microsoft's internal documents, but also from Sony's.

          I'm all for a good MS bashing, but really I applaud them in this case. Fuck Sony, they are the worst when it comes to exclusives, and Starfield is now available to far more gamers than if MS had not bought them.

          I can't speak to their other purc

          • Marketing deals with timed exclusivity are pretty common, and every console vendor has taken part in this practice over time. Mass Effect was exclusive to Xbox for a long time back in the 360 era and it was a compelling reason to own the console. These games also come to other consoles in time once the exclusivity period expires which gives consumers a choice. The publisher also makes these decisions on a title-by-title basis and will tend to gravitate to where the customers are - which is how market for

            • Marketing deals with timed exclusivity are pretty common, and every console vendor has taken part in this practice over time.

              What do you mean timed? Stop excusing shitty behaviour. And stop equating the tiny tiny handful of MS exclusives, with Sony literally budgeting many millions of dollars every year to snatch up what they think is hot. And not timed, but permanent.

              Mass Effect was exclusive to Xbox for a long time back in the 360 era and it was a compelling reason to own the console.

              That's a false equivalence. In the era of Mass Effect the consoles were so widely different in API that releasing it on multiple platforms was borderline re-writing the entire game engine. Mass Effect was released on every platform that supported the game code, it w

              • What do you mean timed? Stop excusing shitty behaviour.

                If you consider timed exclusives to be shitty behavior then Death's Door, Twelve Minutes, Scorn, High On Life, Sommerville, Arc 2, The Last Case of Benedict Fox and more are all similar Xbox examples from the past couple of years. It's simply normal industry practice because getting promotional tie-ins turns out to be valuable, focusing on a single console can simplify things for a developer, and reducing risk with financial support during development is extremely attractive. It's a risky, hit-driven busi

    • the current crop of politicians isn't going to fuck and all about anti-trust law, and the Supreme Court is packed with corporate shills who are openly accepting bribes, so no relief there.

      Unless we stop getting distracted by moral panics then the beating will continue until moral improves, and then keep going after that...

      • Yeah because the distant third place loser in a vertical needs to be stopped from growing through acquisitions via anti-trust enforcement.

        Clown world.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Can't compete? Buy the competition. Long past time for antitrust regulation to kick in...

      If you're talking about vendor lock-in and platform exclusivity, Sony is a far worse offender than Microsoft. At least most of the crap on XBox makes it's way to PC as well.

      That, and the fact it's actually cheaper over all, is why I'm glad to be a PC gamer. With Linux based platforms becoming available and getting content, it's an exciting time.

      • Not that I'm a fan of Sony nor nothin' but I strongly suspect "everything on PC" from Microsoft was nothing more than an expensive attempt to outdo Sony. Come to GamePass(tm) where you rent games forever and can play on Xbox(tm) and PC (windows only, encrypted, modding not guaranteed.)

        When Microsoft is involved, expect a rug pull. GamePass hasn't been setting the investors wallets a flame with its success, and it hasn't managed to do much damage to Sony's dominance either. About the only good it did was per

  • No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dr_fyzziks ( 1211434 ) on Thursday August 31, 2023 @02:37PM (#63812844)

    It's like game reviewers have the memories of goldfish ... Both No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous have been there and done that ... years ago.

    Elite Dangerous' galaxy is based on the actual stellar cartography and layout of our own galaxy - including the distribution of metal-rich vs. non-metal-rich stars, globular clusters, etc. There are planets and moons that you can land on and explore, each with their own gravity, geography, etc. There are literally billions of star systems in Elite Dangerous, and a good % of those have celestial bodies you can land on. And you won't find "boundaries" on those bodies either - you can fly, drive or walk across the entirety of the surface.

    Same goes for No Man's Sky.

    I feel like there are a going to be a lot of people who are going to be disappointed in Starfield's limitations.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      It's like game reviewers have the memories of goldfish ... Both No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous have been there and done that ... years ago.

      1986 [wikipedia.org] sends its regards (Starflight, 800 planets).

    • More than that, the planets in Elite Dangerous (unlike NMS) are full size, not miniaturised planetoids. If it's a planet the size of Earth, it will take you weeks in realtime to drive around it. Some crazy fools have done it too, although they probably stuck to some of the smaller planetoids.

      • If it's a planet the size of Earth, , it will take you weeks in realtime to drive around it.

        Unless it is like the Earth in which case you can't get anywhere near the surface. That's the problem with ED: they added airless worlds to explore but there are only so many lifeless planets you can explore before it gets rather boring and we have been able to do that for many years without any sign that they are going to start adding planets with thick atmospheres and life. The original premise of ED was fantastic but sadly it seems to have completely stalled in recent years.

        • True, but to allow Cmdrs to land on earth-likes would require not only oceans, forests, fauna, etc, but also 1000s of procedurally generated cities players would want to drive around in, fight in, loot and explore. All seamlessly, without invisible fences or loading screens. Maybe one day, but I don't think we're there yet.

          • ...but also 1000s of procedurally generated cities...

            You could start with only Earth-likes outside the inhabited bubble.

    • Good luck trying to land on the "Earth Like" worlds in Elite.

    • It's like game reviewers have the memories of goldfish ... Both No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous have been there and done that ... years ago.

      Elite Dangerous' galaxy is based on the actual stellar cartography and layout of our own galaxy - including the distribution of metal-rich vs. non-metal-rich stars, globular clusters, etc. There are planets and moons that you can land on and explore, each with their own gravity, geography, etc. There are literally billions of star systems in Elite Dangerous, and a good % of those have celestial bodies you can land on. And you won't find "boundaries" on those bodies either - you can fly, drive or walk across the entirety of the surface.

      Same goes for No Man's Sky.

      I feel like there are a going to be a lot of people who are going to be disappointed in Starfield's limitations.

      No Man's Sky had infinite planets but an extremely finite variety of planets. A handful of planet types with a handful of different minerals on them and a few different mission types.

      The thing Bethesda can presumably do with it's AAA budget is hire enough artists create 1000 distinctive planets. There will definitely still be repetition, but it won't be the obvious procedurally generated minor variations on existing templates.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        I'm assuming you never played a bethesda game before. Because "this dungeon is just like the other dungeon, it just has set pieces of the dungeon arranged in a different order" has been their bread and butter ever since elder scrolls.

    • And you won't find "boundaries" on those bodies either - you can fly, drive or walk across the entirety of the surface.

      You will find impenetrable boundaries the instant you find a body with an atmosphere. There are only so many airless, rocky bodies you can explore before that gets quite boring while the exotic Ammonia worlds or beautiful Earth-like worlds remain entirely out of reach. You can't even fly through the atmosphere of a gas giant.

    • Speaking of memories of a goldfish:
      Elite Dangerous - Not a story driven game. Nothing at all like Starfield. Planets completely procedurally generated (unlike Starfield which has significant manual curation).
      No Man's Sky - Not someone who has done that years ago. No Man's Sky completely worthless on release. It lacked basically anything that makes it a compelling game. Having a random world generator didn't make it compelling, and there were many MANY updates and patches before that game did anything other

      • NMS was actually interesting enough at release, but grindy, and the story itself was seriously lacking at first, especially the ending. Still I played it a fair bit at launch and still play it today. The big issue for NMS was that there were many things promised, and most of those were not delivered in the game at release. To Hello Games' credit, they kept updating it to make it better, and it's an excellent game now. Elite Dangerous is actually a different kind of game: it's a sort of galaxy simulation of

  • It's not 1000 useable planets, it includes gas giants and moons around gas giants. Most of which are barren rock that get you resources and even the non barren planets turn out relatively quickly to be full of copypasted generated encounters and quests outside the prewritten sidequests. Moreover, you don't get planets, you get small tiles generated by the player seed and location seed to explore with loading screens galore. Will it be a good BGS game that's a breath of fresh air after all the Elder Scrolls

  • Like any other sensible person, I am waiting for the game to be made playable by a patch . . . from the modding community.
  • This isn't No Man's Sky - I've liked Bethesda's RPG sandboxes but they've never been known for their revolutionary engine.
    Hell it's the one people make memes about (Skyrim "NPC" walk), and that's true of pretty much every game they make - they're fun but not pushing any technical boundaries.

  • Funny how they have no plans to release on Mac or Playstation or other non-Microsoft systems, despite Bethesda having done so for past games (not all of them, but TESO is multi-platform, for example).

    And stop the bullshit that it's too much work or not worth it. I'm a one-man indie developer and I've published several games on Mac, Linux and Windows. If a one-man show can do it, a major games studio can easily. (it's the consoles that are out of reach for indies, because licenses and stuff)

    • Microsoft owns Zenimax, Bethesda's parent company. Of course they have no interest in releasing for playstation or non-microsoft systems. They shelled out the money to ensure exclusivity.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kwerle ( 39371 )

      Huh. I'm a M$ shareholder (was gifted some shares about 25 years ago). I wonder if I should sue them for losing out on market share because they didn't port to other platforms.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Funny how they have no plans to release on Mac or Playstation or other non-Microsoft systems, despite Bethesda having done so for past games (not all of them, but TESO is multi-platform, for example).

      And stop the bullshit that it's too much work or not worth it. I'm a one-man indie developer and I've published several games on Mac, Linux and Windows. If a one-man show can do it, a major games studio can easily. (it's the consoles that are out of reach for indies, because licenses and stuff)

      Or, given how fic

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        And Macs well, I'm not entirely sure of your point since most games ignore Macs.

        And yet I have a games library of over a hundred Mac games, many of them big studio titles.

        My own Steam statistics show that the ratio of Mac gamers is twice as high as the typical ratio of Mac users. Or in other words: Mac users are twice as willing to spend money on a game compared to Windows users.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      yea, I am sure your crappy flappy bird clone is on the same scale as Starfield. Mac is in la la land with their entirely special sauce hardware, and linux can't even get their shit together enough to work out of the box with wifi half the time

      Besides MS owns the studio, why would they want to not have an exclusive game?

      • I yet Baldur's Gate 3 works flawlessly for me on Linux. Some magic eh!

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        I am sure your crappy flappy bird clone

        That you can't imagine a solo dev making a solid, beautiful game speaks volumes about your own abilities. Meanwhile, tons of really good games are made by solo or small team studios.

        For the record, my game is here: https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com]

        Is it on a Starfield scale? Of course not. But I think a blind man can see it's not flappy bird.

        Besides MS owns the studio, why would they want to not have an exclusive game?

        That, exactly, is the point.

        MS owning the studio makes the end product worse.

    • I don't think Bethesda has published any of their recent titles on Mac going back at least two decades, maybe even longer. Really the only ones losing out on this are people who exclusively game on the newest Sony console.

      Given how buggy their games usually are, it seems like they have enough trouble just getting it working well on one platform.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        The Elder Scrolls Online has a native Mac version. So no, you're wrong.

  • Spoiler: No it's not (Score:3)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Thursday August 31, 2023 @04:51PM (#63813180)
    "Procedural content is!..." shut up ya slashvertisement. Aint nothin new bout random generation in games, and the review embargo just dropped revealing the game is overbloated with junk obscuring the fun parts at times, including a long list of useless planets.

    • and the review embargo just dropped revealing the game is overbloated with junk obscuring the fun parts at times

      That's a weird way of saying "generally positive" with more than half of reviewers rating it over 90/100.

      What reviews are you reading? "I shit on everything I find - The Magazine"?

  • Spore laughs.

  • We should be up to gigaplanets by now, at least.

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