Starfield extended demo, looks great imo

[kitler53]

No procedural generation is used seamlessly for essentially everything. It takes way too long for an artist to fully hand craft stuff over and over as designs are iterated. The vast open landscapes use procedural generation and the dense detailed cities use procedural generation.

Unlike NMS starfield at worst will have every procedural element verified by an artist. With 1,000 planets and only a fraction of them supporting life, a single artist in a week could veto everything that looks bad until good results are found. Spore used a similar method for its planets.



Yeah I mean npc and item persistence. In Skyrim you can remove stuff from your inventory and it'll just stay there forever.

that's not quite what i'm getting at.

i hate to use this term but places like iowa is sometimes called a "fly over state".   long expanses of repetitive landscape that you just pass though on your way to something interesting.    in games procedural generation serves a similar purpose.

i'm sure there is a ton of procedurally generated content in uncharted as you walk though jungle passage ways and even most of the ruins are clearly "lego blocked" in if you are looking for it.   but along the way many uniquely crafted points of interest or even chapter specific gameplay sequences like the train scene in U2.   it's those moments that make the procedurally generated "walk through" content bearable.   when the entire game is procedural it easier to spot and harder to forgive.

i'll bet starfield would let me walk all the way to the elments you see in the background.   ..but there is literally nothing of interest between here and there.

A lot of people do find those things fun.
There's a whole genre of games for exploring space.  

No Man's Sky is pretty well enjoyed. It got a bad rap at the start because it overpromised, but it's still a pretty popular game. No Man's Sky - Steam Charts
It's got 14,000+ players despite being several years old at this point.


I would also say distance doesn't really matter, what matters is how time consuming vs how fun it is to travel. If you have a rocket ship to go to a different place on the planet in 60 seconds, it doesn't matter if that distance is a mile or 5,000 miles.  

you can always find someone that thinks something is fun....



....but 14,000 isn't a huge number.   millions of people bought nms on the idea of a vast explorable open world and at least a sizable majority of them decided that it wasn't fun to play and hence gave the game a bad rating and the resultant meme:

"no man's sea" for sea of thieves  or "no man's skyrim" for star fall where the intended meaning is clear.   a large expansive map filled with nothing to do.

[Legend]

that's not quite what i'm getting at.

i hate to use this term but places like iowa is sometimes called a "fly over state".   long expanses of repetitive landscape that you just pass though on your way to something interesting.    in games procedural generation serves a similar purpose.

i'm sure there is a ton of procedurally generated content in uncharted as you walk though jungle passage ways and even most of the ruins are clearly "lego blocked" in if you are looking for it.   but along the way many uniquely crafted points of interest or even chapter specific gameplay sequences like the train scene in U2.   it's those moments that make the procedurally generated "walk through" content bearable.   when the entire game is procedural it easier to spot and harder to forgive.

i'll bet starfield would let me walk all the way to the elments you see in the background.   ..but there is literally nothing of interest between here and there.

Gotcha. Not necessarily the procedural generation itself, but the scope it enables.

I fully agree that these planets will be pretty boring to just wander around aimlessly. Doubt that's what the game expects from players though. At this scale the game needs to use targeted exploration instead. Maybe the player has coordinates they're hunting down, maybe the mountain looked like a good location for a base, etc.

Kerbal Space Program is a good example of this in practice. The planets are super bland but the area around your lander always feels special.

[the-pi-guy]

....but 14,000 isn't a huge number.   millions of people bought nms on the idea of a vast explorable open world and at least a sizable majority of them decided that it wasn't fun to play and hence gave the game a bad rating and the resultant meme:

"no man's sea" for sea of thieves  or "no man's skyrim" for star fall where the intended meaning is clear.   a large expansive map filled with nothing to do.

14,000 people is one platform at one particular time. That might be 50,000 people on Steam alone, and it might mean something like 300,000 people across PS4/XB/etc.

Those are respectable made-up numbers for a 6 year old game.

[Legend]

Yes, dialogue in @StarfieldGame is first person and your character does not have a voice. pic.twitter.com/A8384m6rGN

— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) June 13, 2022

[kitler53]

Gotcha. Not necessarily the procedural generation itself, but the scope it enables.

yeah, that's a pretty good way of putting it.

I fully agree that these planets will be pretty boring to just wander around aimlessly. Doubt that's what the game expects from players though. At this scale the game needs to use targeted exploration instead. Maybe the player has coordinates they're hunting down, maybe the mountain looked like a good location for a base, etc.

then what is even the point of having 1000 planets?    mathematically, if i simply visited all 1000 planets for 5 minutes that would already bring the gameplay counter up to 83 hours.   realistically most people probably won't even visit 100 planets over the course of their entire game.     i'll bet the main story line only requires you to go to 10-20 planets ala mass effect and the rest of them are just procedurally generated filler for the basis of creating a base for resource harvesting.  

[the-pi-guy]

then what is even the point of having 1000 planets?    mathematically, if i simply visited all 1000 planets for 5 minutes that would already bring the gameplay counter up to 83 hours.   realistically most people probably won't even visit 100 planets over the course of their entire game.     i'll bet the main story line only requires you to go to 10-20 planets ala mass effect and the rest of them are just procedurally generated filler for the basis of creating a base for resource harvesting.  

Bethesda kind of has a history of making huge games that people put 100's of hours into.

Based on Skyrim:
The main story will probably be 40 hours, assuming there is a regular main story.
With 150+ hours of mostly hand crafted content.
With basically infinite hours of procedurally generated content (in Skyrim, things like dragons can spawn indefinitely.)


As for the point, it can help with realism and diversity.


I think a big part of Bethesda's goals for their games is to try to make worlds. The intention isn't a tight experience like Mass Effect or Uncharted. It's somewhere between that and Minecraft.
It's more about experiencing the world itself than experiencing a tight 12 hour story.

But critically you don't need to be able to experience the entire world to have fun. And I think it's a cool aspect of these worlds that not everyone is going to see the same things, and certainly not in the same order.
At an extreme, we could both be going to planets that look very different from eachother. Everyone gets their own experience.

you can always find someone that thinks something is fun....

I'm not really sure if I would find these things fun, but I certainly know people that do/would.

[Legend]

Just got off the phone with The Toddfather himself, Todd Howard, talking Starfield. I had follow-up questions after yesterday's reveal, and he had ANSWERS. To hear it first, join us live on Unlocked tomorrow, right after the Xbox Extended Showcase.

You won't want to miss this.

— Ryan McCaffrey (@DMC_Ryan) June 13, 2022

[Legend]

Confirmed that they don't expect players to randomly explore the dead planets. They're there to give players more freedom.

Also this is the largest game they've worked on in general. Main quest probably 20% bigger than Skyrim and tons tons more everywhere else.

Cannot seamlessly fly between space and planets. Not worth the dev time.

[the-pi-guy]

We do a lot of procedural generation [in Starfield], but I would keep in mind that we've always done that," Howard explained. "It's a big part of Skyrim in terms of questing and some other things we do. We generate landscape using procedural systems, so we've always kind of worked on it. [The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall is] one we look at a lot in terms of game flow. And we had been developing some procedural technology and doing some prototypes, and it really started coming to a head with Starfield, in that we think we can do this."

While he didn't go into details, Howard stressed that Starfield's procedural generation is robust enough to handle the sheer scale of variety required to build 100 solar systems' worth of planets:

"So it starts with: Can you even pull it off, visually? You know, a planet. And a planet by itself, if you think about it in a game concept, just one planet is infinitely big if you're going to do it in some realistic fashion. So once you're dealing with scale like that, and procedural systems, the difference between, say, one planet that has some variation on it, and a hundred planets, or a thousand planets, it's actually not that big of a leap, if that makes sense - once you have good systems working for that."

But what Howard seems especially clear about is that there is a 'golden path' (or perhaps 'golden freeway' might be more appropriate) through Starfield, which represents the full, handcrafted Bethesda RPG fans would expect, and he stresses that the team has created more handmade content than ever before, set within its giant procedural galaxy:

"I should also add that we have done more handcrafting in this game, content-wise, than any game we've done. We're [at] over 200,000 lines of dialogue, so we still do a lot of handcrafting and if people just want to do what they're used to in our games, and follow a main quest, and do the questlines, you're gonna see what you'd kind of expect from us. But then you have this whole other part of, 'Well I'm just going to wander this planet, and it's going to provide some gameplay, and some random content, and those kinds of things.' Kind of like a Daggerfall would, if you go way back."

sauce


I think people playing Skyrim/others will get what they expected.

[the-pi-guy]

Todd Howard segments run at 1080p at perfect 30 fps.

Cinematics run at 4k30* with TAA.

Gameplay runs at 4K30* with frequent drops without AA.

*The video is in a 30 fps container, there are drops below that, but it's hard to say if it goes above 30

[Legend]

Todd Howard segments run at 1080p at perfect 30 fps.

Cinematics run at 4k30* with TAA.

Gameplay runs at 4K30* with frequent drops without AA.

*The video is in a 30 fps container, there are drops below that, but it's hard to say if it goes above 30

I'll probably play on pc instead of series x, but those numbers look promising. Hopefully it doesn't have weird frame pacing stuff, I love a locked 30 fps.

lol at including Howard.