this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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A Starfield remake, of sorts, has been created in 48 hours, incorporating seamless travel between planets, something missing from the actual Bethesda RPG.

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[–] GrayBackgroundMusic@lemm.ee 155 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"remake" is generous of the titling editor. That's a tech demo or a mechanic demo. Still good, though. The seamless transitions are nice.

[–] cdipierr@beehaw.org 78 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yeah - of course games are hard - but all he did was rough out a planet-to-space experience in Unreal Engine with a Starfield aesthetic. If he started trying to build an actual game on it... Well an 8 year timeline doesn't seem crazy.

[–] ursakhiin@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

And this whole conversation overlooks one of the major complaints a player would have of Bethesda did the same thing.

Entering an atmosphere changes the physics and those physics are different for all sorts of reasons on every planetary body for every ship. From gravity to atmospheric density the ship would fly differently on every one and that ignores the fact that ships are near enough to infinite in configuration in this game due to the builder.

If Bethesda did this, players would be complaining it wasn't realistic enough.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Those are solved issues in other engines, meaning not at all insurmountable.

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[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is basically what No Man's Sky did. When Bethesda took their crappy RPG engine and mocked up interplanetary travel using loading screens and then started writing quests and storylines, NMS focused on building a very good engine that allowed you to go from surface to air to space to interplanet / stellar while mostly ignoring the rest of gameplay and storytelling.

And not to be too hard on No Man's Sky given the resource differential, but ultimately all it is is one really rock solid system thats not quite a full game surrounded by a lot of hollow feeling stuff to kinda flesh it out on paper. Ultimately Starfield has way sharper hooks almost immediately simpy because while it has a relatively crappy engine and at time frustrating amounts of loading screens and limitations, they spent more time writing content and dialogue that makes the universe feel actually alive and rich, and polishing each individual system until it's fun.

I think The Outer Worlds is also worth comparing to as Obsidian is even farther down the same route as Bethesda imho, making a much smaller universe that feels even less free than Starfield but having even better writing and I would argue it's possibly the best game of the three though I have to withhold my judgement on Starfield until I atleast finish the main quests.

[–] theangriestbird@beehaw.org 72 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I love that the thumbnail for every article about Starfield is an uncomfortable close-up of a character's dialogue face.

[–] Quentinp@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago

I just know what she's saying too "we you have a free moment i need to talk to you"

[–] totallymojo@ttrpg.network 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's what you see like 70% of the game.

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[–] CarlsIII@kbin.social 63 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wow they remade a game as big as starfield in only 48 hours? Just recording all the dialogue during that time would have been intense

[–] BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago

he had them record at 16x speed then just slowed it down in post. pretty impressive

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[–] Renacles@discuss.tchncs.de 52 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Guys, this is literally just a tech demo made in Unreal, it's not news.

[–] NuPNuA@lemm.ee 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yeah, but the SEO rewards anything with the word "Starfield" in it at the moment and there's enough people seemingly invested in putting down the game at every opportunity that they'll share this around and drive clicks.

[–] Quentinp@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My google news feed is like all Starfield now - getting ridiculous and i'm expecting by tomorrow will be like "Should you make french toast and eat it while playing Starfield?"

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[–] zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not a fan of starfield but this is just misleading. It's a tech demo in a vastly different engine devoid of content.

[–] doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

And it's demoing something Elite Dangerous has had for years.

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[–] Jaysyn@kbin.social 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

So basically what No Man's Sky has had for years?

[–] bobettes_bob@kbin.social 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Elite Dangerous too. I was really disappointed when I lauched Starfield and learned there wasn't any seamless landing for exploring planets. It was a huge bummer to me.

[–] iAmTheTot@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Elite Dangerous is by far the most fun I've ever had landing and taking off in a space ship. No other game comes even close. It genuinely never got old. The entire docking process was so damn fun with a HOTAS.

[–] Dartos@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Oh wow, I haven't played since before you could land on planets. My issue with Elite was always feeling like there was exactly nothing to do at all beside mine and be bad at dog fights lol.

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[–] Sordid@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

Frontier: Elite 2 had it in 1993. There really is no excuse at this point.

[–] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Star Citizen as well. The game is ludicrously unfinished for how long it's been in development IMO, but it does have that at least.

[–] Spacemanspliff@midwest.social 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Star citizen has become one of my favorite dev hell sagas. I had such high hopes for it when it was announced over a decade ago.....

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[–] li10@feddit.uk 22 points 1 year ago (15 children)

It is essentially just a tech demo BUT, I would say they’ve touched on what I wanted from the space travel.

You can take off, fly the ship, point it up, and then boost off into space. That’s fun, that’s what I wanted, and I don’t think it’s really expecting that much.

“It’S NoT ReAlIsTiC”, none of it’s realistic, it’s a video game ffs.

It’s a fun and engaging mechanic that I’d expect in a great space game.

Bethesda’s seeming disdain for anything that could be considered a fun and seamless mechanic is frustrating. And fanboys seemingly have no expectation that Bethesda games should actually get better and improve on their weak areas.

[–] Dartos@beehaw.org 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think Bethesda "fanboys" (like myself) just really like the core experience (warts and all) I play NMS when I want to lose myself in a beautiful seamless scifi setting and i play starfield when my focus is on engaging with faction and character storylines and some campy space encounters. I kinda like how janky bethesda games can be, reminds me of playing tabletop RPGs and all the weird janky shit that happens in those games too. I like that I can be the golden boy of the crimson fleet and still join up with the freestar rangers. I make up a little story for my character and act it out and have a lot of fun doing so.

The only thing I could do without is the loading screens. I don't mind that landing on a planet isn't seamless, but i mean... loading screen to get on ship, loading screen to get into space, loading screen to fly to different planet, wait until scan finishes, loading screen to land on planet.

That's the worse part for me. If it was just a short cut scene for landing on a planet, I think that'd be 100% fine.

[–] li10@feddit.uk 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I just don’t think it’s good to let a company get away with not improving.

The small improvements they have made in Starfield are alright, but it feels like the bar was set with Skyrim and they can’t even really match something from 12 years ago.

I do not have high hopes for TES VI and I’m half expecting something extremely dated, as based off FO4 and Starfield I think the studio’s best days are behind them at this point.

[–] beefcat@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Starfield seems like a pretty stark improvement over Fallout 4's shortcomings, so I don't think it is fair to say that they aren't improving. Just looking at my own playtime, I bailed out of Fallout 4 at the 20 hour mark, but I'm 60 hours into Starfield and haven't slowed down at all.

[–] Goronmon@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The small improvements they have made in Starfield are alright, but it feels like the bar was set with Skyrim and they can’t even really match something from 12 years ago.

Or maybe game development is just hard? Why haven't other "better" developers created a game that improves upon Skyrim?

Look at Baldur's Gate 3. It's "small improvements" to the type of game that Larian has been working on for many years at this point.

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[–] NuPNuA@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just don't see atmospheric entry/exit as being that important to my immersion, yes it was kind of cool the first time you did it in NMS, seven years ago, but it got old fairly quickly even in that game. I'm happy for Starfield to have a more ME like set up and focus on other areas of the game.

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[–] Poob@lemmy.ca 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Bethesda can't even get ladders working in their engine, and y'all were expecting seamless atmospheric re-entry?

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They have working ladders in Starfield. They finally did it.

[–] Poob@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago

Oh wow. A truely stunning achievement for this small indie studio.

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[–] Ser_Salty@feddit.de 11 points 1 year ago

They do have ladders in Starfield, actually

[–] GreenMario@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would be impressed if they did it in Gamebryo/Creation Engine and solve the "everything is a cell" problem. I mean, No man's Sky and Elite Dangerous exist and have shown seem less space travel. One guy with DarkBasic did it in the Evochron games for decades.

This comes off as a hey look look at me I can do it in a cave with a box of scraps but BUGTHESDA can't in 7 years?!

[–] comicallycluttered@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I think the problem is also that Bethesda doesn't really "do" vehicles, probably due to engine limitations.

Usually, it's just horses or "passenger" travel (like when you man the guns in FO4 birds). I guess one could maybe consider power armor in FO4 to be kind of like a "vehicle", but it works more or less the same as just walking around.

Oh, there is dragon riding in Skyrim, but it's a mess and you don't have that much control.

I'm surprised the engine can even handle space combat, honestly. And 360° movement as well, which would have been great for dragon riding in Skyrim. But most of the dragons in TES are dead, so we probably won't get proper dragon riding in whatever TES: VI is.

(Sidenote about dragon riding/combat: Before Larian delved further into CRPGs, they made a regular third person RPG where you could play as a dragon. It was actually pretty fun. Still didn't have full control, and it was only in certain sections, but it was entertaining. Divinity II: Director's Cut, in case anyone's interested. Don't know how well it's aged, but I enjoyed it a few years ago.)

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[–] storksforlegs@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This is great. Amidst all the comparisons and issues with Starfield, I am learning about so many other good space exploration games in these discussions haha

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[–] InfiniWheel@lemmy.one 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm no gaming expert or Bethesda fanboy, but didn't someone the other day confirm that there is actual space travel in the game, it just takes days to get to another planet?

[–] emptyother@programming.dev 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, just that there are no invisible walls. After 7 hours of flying, she reached a paper-cutout of the planet.

[–] WarmSoda@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I see. In that case I fully expect someone to make a 'open cities' mod for systems. If you can reach the billboards it should be possible to create a transition to planet space. Maybe.

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[–] TheChurn@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can fly in space towards the planets you can see. When you get there, you won't be able to land and will be able to fly straight through the planet itself.

Planets outside of the fast travel menu aren't really planets

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[–] WarmSoda@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

The engine works by having square areas of playable in-game sections called cells. Unless the devs created enough cells between planets, and have them in the same world space, for a player to travel in that's not possible.

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[–] Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk 8 points 1 year ago

Aw. I was hoping to see him seamlessly fly to the Volii system, seamlessly fly to Volii Alpha, seamlessly land on the Neon landing pad, seamlessly enter the Bayu Plaza and, seamlessly interact with dozens of NPCs, many of whom have branching dialogue trees, and seamlessly loot the ever-loving crap out of hundreds of interactable objects.

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