The Real Problem with Starfield 

Imagine if they had made 5 handcrafted planets with maps comparable in size to an elder scrolls game, rather than 1000 proceduarlly generated turds. That would have been truely compelling.

The problem of the walls in Skyrim vs the walls in starfield, is that in Skyrim, they said 'you get to explore skyrim' so when the invisible walls are there at the border of Skyrim, you say 'well they said Skyrim I have Skyrim I can't expect high rock too. But with starfield, they said 'you get 1000 planets'. And then when you try to explore it like every other Bethesda game you get invisible walls. So as far as my understanding is, you drop into a planet find the 3 or so points of interest and then leave. There isn't ever anything *more* to that tile. It leaves it feeling more empty because after the first few chunks you get the idea of what to expect.

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO PAID $100 TO PLAY THE WORST VERSION OF THE GAME TO SAVE THE REST OF US FROM LOSING $70 🙏

Well, actually he also conducted an experiment walking to the point of interest and there were just 7 worms and a poo with medkit or something in it, and another point just made you scan two rocks. So it is not that Luke is just mad about inability to run around the empty planet, he also admits that even existing points are meaningless.

I honestly feel like this game would've HUGELY benefitted from Bethesda just making one galaxy/system with like 8-12 planets all of which are huge and filled with interesting things to do, I feel like if they did this most of the non bug related issues of the game could've been avoided including unsatisfying spaceship travel since the scope of the actual space aspect of the game would be smaller.

Minecraft did free exploration better than starfield

The first mistake is believing that Todd Howard isn't just doing pure marketing when he says it's fully explorable, the second is buying this at full price.

The real problem with starfield is that these things like invisible walls and jpg planets break immersion. When you stare into the space, you don't wonder what's out there, because it's not an actual space, it's all just small instances, there is no area, you teleport between boxes.

Promising “thousands of planets” to explore should’ve been the first indication. No game is simply made better by being bigger, if everything they created is empty and you’re running for 15-20 minutes just to find something interesting. Very different approach than BG3.

The invisible wall in Skyrim is right at the edge of the map, on the border with other countries. Its not comparable to Starfield. This would be the equivalent of letting you explore exactly one town and the outlying area before you hit a wall and then have to load up the next region of Skyrim.

Man, the honeymoon period for this game was really short lived wasn’t it?

This game suffers from the No Man's Sky dilemma where every planet feels exactly the same in terms of structures and even creatures. Only difference is NMS lets you explore it with vehicles instead of on-foot and doesn't lock you in with invisible barriers.

The problem isn't invisible walls in general. The problem is we are constantly being lied to by game companies. Has Todd Howard ever not told a lie? I mean it's like a meme at this point. Don't say it's open if it isn't. Simple as that.

For me, the existential dread (dramatic, I know) sets in when you are constantly aware that you’re in a game due to fast travel being the only travel. In Skyrim/Fallout 4 you had a world space you could traverse on foot and it felt like you were situated in a location in a world because you went from point A to B without a loading screen, discounting entering areas. Starfield doesn’t allow traveling unless you fast travel, which means there is always a loading screen, and since I’m always aware of the procedurally generated world spaces which pull from a pool to sprinkle 5-6 areas of interest, it makes me feel like I’m in a holo-deck, the voyage from planet to planet, orbit to atmosphere to surface, star system to star system, is just always a loading screen. The game tells me I went from A to B but I didn’t experience any of it.

1:17 That's the big deal. Outside of the quests "there's nothing [there] anywhere" on any planet worth investigating.

Problem as I see it is that even though there are walls in skyrim, it’s one huge open world you can explore. Starfield feels like a thousand tiny slivers of an open world you load in between. It feels incredibly compartmentalized, like an open world with 1000% added loading screens and menu navigating. Doesn’t make the game shit in itself but it does kinda clash with the notion of free exploration.

"There's nothing here... Anywhere." Asmongold got to the real issue.

the twitter guy who said you can tell it's bad by looking at the menu was right ig.

People never learn. When devs promise an "immense" game with hundreds of possibilities you know it's going to be the most generic thing ever. It's literally the only way it works. I would rather have regular static maps that are dense.

I absolutely adore Skyrim and even in the base game, the world feels lived in and there are so many things that you can explore. We joke about it, but Skyrim's the kind of game where you'll max out your character and complete everything else before actually getting to the main quest because there's so much to do and you encounter it AS YOU TRAVEL. You can but you don't specifically travel to the points of interest. I was worried that Starfield was going to be too big that the space just feels empty and I'm really sad that people are confirming my worries

I don't know why they didn't just make each planet a dungeon scenario like in Skyrim or Fallout. Instead of a marker on a compass you have planets. Land there and there is a tailor made 20-50 minute experience to play through with unique stories. That is what I was expecting. That is a Bethesda game to me and has always been their greatest strength. Instead you get the same caves and facilities repeated ad nauseum.

I know people will talk about mods fixing the game in x amount of time, but isn't it sad that gamers end up finishing the game for the massive company instead of, I don't know, finishing it themselves?

In summary everything in Starfield are more repetitive than the most basic farming system

Thats a bummer, one of the things I really appreciated about Skyrim/oblivion were the small stories you just happen upon while exploring. I loved all the different cave systems and how each one seemed to have its own story, sometimes you stumble on something that ends up being a part of a much larger quest without realizing it. Sad they couldnt keep that going

Skyrim had invisible walls but the map designers used terrain to block them off (with one exception)

Yeah, this video absolutely nails it. The real satisfaction from exploring doesn't come from the scale of the terrain but what you find in the process of discovery. Starfield offers nothing in this regard because once you've seen the same extremely limited points of interest repeated a couple of times--why bother doing it again? This is basically the same playing area as Skyrim only spread out across the illusion of a star chart with procedurally generated backdrops. And it might be fun to play with those severely lowered expectations but don't confuse it with a genuine voyage into the unknown.

Asmon, you are absolutely right. The whole game feels bland and I hate to say that. Soulless a.f.

Starfield just makes me realize even more how fucking huge Star Citizen actually is, and will be if it's ever finished.

The game really makes you FEEL like it was made by ChatGpt and Midjourney

Starfield is a game of set pieces surrounded by a cut and paste universe where they only did ctrl-c once

Just saw the previous video called “Starfield planets are just flat textures” and I can’t stop laughing because it’s true, they’re just empty stickers, nothing in them 😂 Fraud Howard strikes again

There should be a detailed seed generating engine that plugs the missions into the generated worlds

This game looks like a solid 5/10 from everything ive seen and heard about it. Amazing job bethesda

I like the defense of "there's nothing here anyway" 😂 perfectly sums up this game

Each map should have a story it wants to tell. Whether it’s abandoned civilisation, nuclear war, ecological disaster, experiment gone wrong, prison planet or just geographical stories. Geographical stories for most of the planets could have been awesome. For instance, planets with thin atmosphere should have a few giant craters that yields explanation about their formation due to absence of atmosphere leading bombardment by rocks. Planets with thick heavy atmosphere, the likes of Venus, have a lot of large rock formation due to high pressure and low visibility like they did with the radiated area in Fallout 4. There’s also visible accretion disks that can make the planet interesting to look at. They need to not just have entries explaining them, but the area that you can explore should have unrealistic but notable landmark to make the planetary exploration feels more special. The best way to incorporate them into the gameplay is making planetary special features affecting gameplay more. What they have in the game is ultimately a little surface level. Just a little more artistic vision and passion would have made exploration a joy.

Seeing Asmongold basically call Luke Stephens an idiot is very satisfying. Every opinion he has is vapid yet people think it sounds like he has a point, when he really doesn’t.

One big thing is that it does not matter where you land, you will always find the same randomly generated shit anywhere you land. You can just pick a random place to land and you will find stuff there. The same stuff that you'll find at whatever else random place of your choosing.

It's probably easier to make a shit ton of randomly generated seeds than it is to make a handful of large detailed worlds

Watching starfield just reminds me of how good no man’s sky is now

The planets function like Skyrim's barrows. I bet they'll eventually release a DLC that will have the player become space whale born. You'll have to travel to each planet, solve a version of essentially the same puzzle, and fight a dark planet boss in order to learn a new whaleborn shot for your new special whaleborn gun.

Yes Skyrim had invisible walls. The gate that leads to Cyrodiil, the mountains all around obviously and some others. Buuuut, Skyrim had tons of stuff above ground, underground and so much more to explore, with interesting sidequests, bosses, eastereggs, generally cool stuff to find and the possibilities to roleplay tons of different class fantasies.

When Todd proudly proclaimed "1000 planets" in the same tone and cadence as he previously touted hundreds of endings and infinite sidequests. I think most people got a bit suspicious.

The Moral of the story is. I have no need to play Starfield. Thank you for saving me time and money.

I think the problem is, who gives a shit about a thousand planets? If there were 5 planets you could explore entirely, people would like that way more. Hell, even just one, one entire planet, that would be awesome.

Got this game … played this game …. Made me want to hug star citizen and never let go…

I knew this 2 years ago. No way Bethesda can make 1000 planets lol.

This isn’t the real problem with Starfield. This is only a “problem” if didn’t pay attention to advertising, and didn’t know what you were buying. Of course the planets you can land on are barren and boring, they’re procedurally generated off of a seed. That’s how most space games are. Starfield’s true problem lies within its stagnancy. There is no “world” plot. Every single quest line is independent to the story at large. There is no big story, there’s hardly any main quest. The main quest is just a faction quest. The world feels dead and unpopulated. There are less settlements in the game than in *skyrim.* You know, a Medieval Nordic landscape? In Starfield, there are only a few memorable (not randomly generated) settlements that the player can visit, being: Akila City, New Atlantis, Cydonia, and Neon. Im aware that there are other towns, such as Paradiso, Hopetown, New Homestead, etc, but none of these towns are explorable or have any quests even tied to them. They all have soulless, unnamed, generic NPCs that all just walk around aimlessly. They don’t have any quest lines or lore, even. “Play forever” is more than a concerning narrative that has been ever-rising in games. I will *always* take a single, crafted 1-4 hour quest line over 100 differently structured radiant quests. There is nothing more monotonous and tiresome.

thank god people are waking up to the fact its absolute shit, i was getting tired of being gaslit by youtubers

Its problem is that the game not as immersive as they describe. It seems less appealing when you can go to No Man Sky and get exactly that. (Even tho nms also has an exceptionally bad launch)

Even if it is boring just walking around a planet, knowing that there is some very artificial limit feels bad. They designed it like this, so I think it's fair to critique it.

The good thing about the Starfield flop is that it exposed the sheer amount of ‘game review’ channels which are being paid by publishers. Specifically those who claimed that the game ran great, was totally bug-free, and hyped up the questline.

What about strange aliens/monsters for out of bound traps? I love playing around with them. Hell, serious sam 3 bfg had giant sandworms. Subnautica has leviathan class lifeforms. Something more creative instead of "turn around" with a pause screen...

I agree its not a big problem within what starfield actually is but alot of people believed it was a Bethesda game wrapped around No Man's Sky

He’s spot on with the map. It makes no sense, you’re constantly having to switch between views and even then you can’t tell where tf anything is

"Hurr durr there were no invisible walls in skyrim!" Midwit take. Bethesda never said you could explore planets in skyrim.

I think one way they could get around the barrier issue if people really want to just keep running, is just load another map area. Loading in a new seed could cause a hitch, but if done right it won't have to go into a loading screen. I definitely don't know how the backend coding all works, but I imagine it could be possible. Also have to wonder, if you then turn around and go back the way you came, will it be able to load the seed you came from, or would it be a whole new seed? As a solo game dev myself (as a hobby), I don't know what is or isn't possible for them with how it is coded.

I feel like the game that everyone wanted Starfield to be, already exists. And it's called No Man's Sky.

personally i don't care about exploring entire planets but they should make what can be explored very interesting to make up for it.

Way he's comparing the planets, is literally the same way how he could compare the dungeons in Skyrim, but that game wons 100s of game of the year awards

It's alright to have high expectations for a game, just be prepared to get punched in the face by reality.

9/10 game by the way ... god the standards for gamers has fallen off a cliff

There is no space exploration in that game, only many game levels and loading screen

Luke Stephens really decimated this crap game

Was it really a surprise how terrible this game was? They're investing much more time into ES6 and Starfield is running the same engine from over a decade ago

I really don't think it's difficult to have fun in this game. If you were truly thinking that a developer was going to fully flesh out 1000 planets to scale, then I don't really know what to say to that.

"I wanna love the game" is a real problem. You don't need to like the shit because there is Bethesda label on it.

Plays Starfield to explore planets < Plays Starfield for the plot and story quests

How did they make a game so much worse than skyrim all rhese years later. Goes to show you how sometimes we decline in our skills as a whole. Teams of people shift and some leave. Things are never the same.

Nvm if this is how ES6 is going to be made, they can keep their shitty no effort games. I’m not about to buy a 70$ Elder Scrolls that’s just a cheap reminder that Skyrim exists. Much like ESO

There is a wall in Skyrim, but it surrounds a giant area that contains tons of varied content. It doesn’t prevent you from exploration because the game was never designed to contain anything but the territory of Skyrim and Solsthiem. Of course, the modding community made Skyrim 5x better than Bethesda. Fortunately people who bought Starfield will be able to improve the experience with mods, but in 2023 they shouldn’t have to.

It became clear to me early in that the "exploration" component of the game is basically just visiting planets for resources when you might need them, but otherwise sticking to the curated locations of the main and side missions. Anyone who thought they were going to find a hidden note behind a rock on a some remote moon that led to an incredible mission or reward was just fooling themselves. Reasonable expectations make for good gameplay experiences.

The problem is that they didn't deliver what they promised. And some gamers just wants to explore inside the game, they're not fucking idiots for enjoying the game like that.

The problem is the game was sold as having 1000 worlds to EXPLORE. Not 1000 worlds with a few areas each to explore. I remember in SWG more than a decade ago I could walk in one direction on a planet and end up back where I started.

You want an authentic "alone is space with nothing but your ship, and a desire to explore the universe" experience just play No Mans Sky

RU-vid's Starfield Haters lied to me. Starfield isn't bad. These haters just suck at playing video games.

@1:05 LMFAO! Ummm, no pal. There isn't a wall on the scale of Starfield in Skyrim. I have over 8,000 hours into playing Skyrim, and I can tell you that you can literally walk from Markarth, all the way over to Riften without hitting an invisible wall stopping you. Compare that to hitting a wall every 20 minutes in Starfield in 2023, and a 2011 game that just allows you to free roam without that set back.

Genuinely sad that Bethesda keeps missing so hard

"There is nothing anywhere" is part of the problem, not an excuse.

This game feels like a competitor to the outer worlds and i think if they were just honest about it not being like no mans sky when they kinda made it seem like it was, its still decent so far

They probably lost a lot of sales with the early access thing.

What's insane to me is that there is a mod on Nexus that removes these invisible walls, albeit the results may vary depending on the different system setups in respect to RAM capability, still it was doable for a modder, yet Bathesda took the safer side of restricting it to avoid crashing (I believe so that lower end systems wouldn't crash) yet I believe they could have taken a smarter approach in spawning/despawning tiles and making it optional for systems that were more capable A note from the modder reads: "I had an intuition as soon as the tile boundary news was leaked, and now I got around to test it, with some mixed results. This setting removes the boundaries of planetary tiles, allowing you to explore some more. Beyond the original boundaries, the game positions resource elements, flora and fauna just like it does in playable areas."

I almost bought it until i saw one of the youtubers pointing all of these out. Such a major disappointment. They expect modders to fill up the entire planet and remove the boundary for them? Nah

I care more for immersive features (lacking), QoL improvements (missing), and performance/bug fix improvements (yeah.. also missing). They could have had that ready especially after a delay.

I wanted to make my own opinion about the game before listening to anybody else's and i was surprised after playing the game for a bit how much hate it has gotten. I was honestly having a good time and having fun and maybe i just haven't played it long enough but it hasn't seemed repetitive at all to me.

That's why this game should be a MMORPG game. There are all those gigantic empty spaces where community could have built cities, civilizations, or whatever to fill those spaces and make space exploration more enjoyable and less repetitive.

I understand what you are saying, but you are missing the point. Exploring the entire planet was one of the main selling points for the game, and that selling point is a lie.

While this game has issues like every other Bethesda game, I’m still having a blast. The main thing I want is a performance update on launch

Spot on....21 hrs in and I was bored shitless...{on a good note I was able to refund it since it's early release}

Reminds me of the exploration in Mass Effect 1. Honestly? If instead of having points of interest you had to _actually_ explore, they could get away with the ammount of content per map. Instead, what the player is left with is an mmo to-do list of going from quest giver A to B without barely noticing what's going on around them.

Modders will solve this probably. Sadly most of the time they don’t get a single dollar from it while people still buys the game at full price.

The game is really good if you’re into Bethesda games, especially Skyrim and Fallout 4. The atmosphere, the music, the overall quality and level of detail are some of the best we’ve ever seen from Bethesda Game Studio, if not the entire industry. The story is engaging (if you’re into sci-fi/aliens,) the characters are well rounded and diverse, and they give you the tools to mold your own player character into whatever you want. If you’re going into the game with the idea that there’s this huge sprawling galaxy full of life you can get endless hours out of exploring, you’re probably going to be disappointed. Randomly landing on an isolated planet and running through all the procedurally generated caves and landmarks sounds like the least enjoyable way to play tbh, it’d be like complaining about the quality of quests in Skyrim when you’re only doing radiant fetch-quests. That kind of universe exploring sim game has already been done really well in No Man’s Sky. Starfield is more about the select few locations that have tons of depth and interactivity, like New Atlantis and Neon, while the rest of the galaxy serves as more of a backdrop to the setting. Having every planet be 100% actually explorable is kind of a ridiculous request, and I think Bethesda did a pretty good job at pulling of what they did within the realms of a role-playing game. And really it all comes down to roleplaying. They give you the tools to have fun within the limits of your own imagination, and they don’t let much get in your way. I’m running a Han Solo/Starlord inspired high charisma drug smuggling captain, and I already have a second character planned out that’s an officer in New Atlantis working to support his parents. If you just play the game mindlessly following quest markers, not really investing yourself in the story or characters, burning yourself out on AI-generated content, it’s just not going to be the game for you.

Theres always so many problems with sci fi space games. It's like setting yourself up for failure because space is huge. Maybe in 100 years they'll be a game that manages to make a whole galaxy explorable filled with lots of interesting things but even then i think you'd need very intelligent A.I to write most of it unless they spend 20/30 years making the game

I'm so gona play this in 2-3 years after all the good mods are out.

You're absolutely wrong this time Asmongold. We had 0 limits in games like Astroneer, No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous, it's not that difficult to provide this in a game in 2023 and yes it's stupid and shouldn't be in the game. (Invisible walls should be a thing of the past in every new game that comes out because of both procedurally generating technologies and AI)

I am surprised the reviewer tried to make such a big deal out of the "scale" when they already had a far more solid point of lack of POIs... They need more Points of interest... not larger maps. How can someone unironically say a map 2km^2+ is "small".

Yeah this is the issue with having a lot of the stuff procedurally generated. It makes the caves and underground bases you explore run the risk of being nearly identical. Whereas say in elden ring they designed each cave and crypt. They had shared assets obviously but the layouts were all actually different. Sometimes minorly, sometimes majorly but there was never an actual identical layout even though they all used the same lever puzzle. Just something that human touch can give to make it feel more unique than procedural generation.

There weren’t messages in skyrim telling you to turn around. My biggest issue is the game is boring and the AI hasn’t improved since skyrim at all.

Meanwhile Skyrim is still a banger even without all the mods that make the game 10 times larger with actual content

Completely agree with Asmon. While I'm really enjoying the game; and there is a lot of game, especially if you get into all the system, crafting, base building, ship building ect, there are major flaws. One big one being the planets and how exploration is.

I’m someone that loves space games. I’ve played tons of them. From space engineers and starship evo, to no man’ sky and star citizen. I have never felt this disconnect from the general consensus that I have with this game. Like it isn’t game of the year but it is exactly what I expected and is what was advertised. I don’t know what tabloid type of information people were reading but it feels so strange to compare the “ lie” allegations from the info I saw leading up to this games release. There are problems of course. Not having ground vehicles makes exploring with a low carry weight troublesome, the Ai for Ally’s isn’t great, but it is just a more commercially viable space game. Fast travel between planets and locations from your ship and being able to instantly travel from the pause menu are just there to assist casual players and the general audience.