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Upcoming Starfield mod introduces seamless planet landing - by Frederik Wessberg (i.imgur.com)
submitted 23 hours ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] 6 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (3 children)

I get what you mean, but it makes sense in context.

Immersive "Open World" Sims with ground and space exploration have a hard time tying the two together. Often they feel like two separate games, and one of them often feels like the "second class (star) citizen". Not that making them seamlessly connected actually makes the two mechanically complimentary, but separating them by a loading screen makes this dichotomy all the more obvious. Starfield was no exception.

To exacerbate this, Bethesda made its brand the "You see that mountain? You can climb it!" game makers (Which, to be honest, I think they started to lose the plot on what made their games good when they started saying this. But that's a different conversation.). So when they made their foray into space exploration, they really had no one else to blame when folks expected a similar "You see that planet? You can fly to it!" design philosophy.

Though I think it would have been overlooked if the game was... good? At the very least, if it was way less bloated with low effort copy pasted fluff content. Complaints like this only tend to become so focal when people have more disappointment to express than meaningful critique can adequately convey.

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  • [–] 2 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

    Though I think it would have been overlooked if the game was… good? At the very least, if it was way less bloated with low effort copy pasted fluff content. Complaints like this only tend to become so focal when people have more disappointment to express than meaningful critique can adequately convey.

    Guess this is a good point here. It's an easy point to talk about specific failures (from perspective of the player) when they don't like the game much. To me it sounds like an excuse not to play or not to like, and this is something they can blame. I don't know for me it wouldn't be a big deal, at least not to this scale. I get that many and long loading screens are terrible. Maybe I'm not the person looking into a virtual reality like immersion and are not affected by such details, therefore don't have the empathy for players missing this feature.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    That's fair. And like I said, seamless landings and planetary travel are cool, but they don't make a game good on their own.

    That said, I'd call it less an "excuse not to like the game" and more a tangible thing players can point to when the real problem is harder to put into words. For a lot of longtime Bethesda fans, imho, that problem is that Starfield failed to deliver the Bethesda-style "believable world."

    Bethesda were never just the "see that mountain, climb it" developers. They were the "every object has a 3D model, every building has an interior, every town has a history, and not everything exists for the player" developers. That put them in a unique spot in the industry. That level of simulation let players believe in and explore their worlds in a way most games simply don't allow. It's why Bethesda games get such oddly specific critiques: where do the NPCs sleep, what do they eat, where do they go to the bathroom?

    This doesn't matter to everyone, so I imagine a lot of these complaints sound trivial or even insane from the outside. But for the people it does matter to, Bethesda was one of the few developers filling that niche.

    So when I see complaints about seamless travel, or shopkeepers not caring that you're standing behind their counter, or nobody reacting when you fire a gun in a crowd, or so many raider bases on an isolated planet with nobody to raid, I don't see an excuse to not like the game. I see players struggling to express their disappointment that the game feels artificial and gamified, and that it failed to capture the soul of a Bethesda game.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 hours ago

    That makes sense. Most people, especially so gamers, are not good at expression their concerns or even know why it is a problem to them. I actually meant my original comment about "excuse not to like the game", just expressed it wrongly myself. The irony right now.

    I actually meant what you say, by people not knowing how to express some other issues, or not thinking about it (but being affected), the focus goes to more obvious and easy to point issues. And to some extend it is actually an excuse, because not having seemless landing I think wouldn't be a big deal if everyone had fun.

    But maybe I'm wrong about this, because games and gamers evolve too. And for such simulation styled games going in and out of planets its a given to them to have a feature like seemless transitions. So when I say that I struggle how this is a game breaking issue to them to a point the refund or stop playing, or don't even buy it, it sounds too extreme. Especially players who didn't experience the game yet and never will just because of it.

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