Us space flight sim enjoyers like that kind of thing. When Starfield was announced we kinda expected it to be a default feature, so obviously when we saw it wasnt a feature it was disappointing.
Comment on Upcoming Starfield mod introduces seamless planet landing - by Frederik Wessberg
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
I’m surprised so many people make this a big deal. It’s a complaint I heard since launch of the game. Some people even stopped playing or didn’t even purchased the game because of this!
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Amberskin@europe.pub 2 days ago
Starfield is NOT a space flight sim. It’s a CRPG set up in a space traveling society, so it has… space travel.
The ‘flight model’ is absolutely arcade-ish and oriented to have fun while pew-pewing pirates or space jihadis, not to provide the player with a ‘sim’.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah, I know it isn’t But even you must admit, our genre is dry as a desert. We take what we can get, even if it’s not exactly a flight sim it can be close enough to scratch the itch.
iamthetot@piefed.ca 2 days ago
Adds a hell of a lot more immersion than a loading screen.
TaterTot@piefed.social 2 days ago
I get the confusion, but it makes sense in context.
For one, 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.
To exacerbate this, Bethesda made it’s “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. But that’s a different conversation.). So when the 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 also may have been overlooked if the game was… good? At the very least, way less bloated with low effort copy pasted fluff content. Complaints like this tend to only stick around when people have more disappointment to express than meaningful critique can adequately convey.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
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.
TaterTot@piefed.social 2 days ago
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.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 days 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.
absquatulate@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I was never too bothered by the landing animation ( or the multitude of loading screens for thag matter ) because I figured it’s a limitation of their engine so they won’t be able to fix it easily or at all - and besides other games have been getting away with it: Mass Effect, SW Outlaws etc.
What irks me about this is that a modder has actually been able to do it, without access to their engine and doing it in their free time. It really shows how lazy bethesda has become and frankly don’t hold much hope for their future games.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
What irks me about this is that a modder has been able to actually do it, without access to their engine and supposedly doing it in their spare time and for free.
Okay, that’s actually amazing and crazy. Modders never stop amazing me. Bethesda still works on the game, so there must be technical reasons why they don’t do it then. Maybe there are edge cases when this doesn’t work well or has side effects. I can fully see why someone gets disappointed if this is actually possible.
murvel@feddit.nu 2 days ago
You just answered your own question…
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
What question? What answer?? I’m surprised many people make a big deal out of this isn’t a question, nor contains it an answer. I’m making an observation, and find it stupid to not play a game because of this.
Varesti@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Yaaaay, now we can do something No Man’s Sky could do 10 years ago, yaaaaaaay!
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
Sure, some games have features others don’t. I’m just surprised its a big deal for so many.
Varesti@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Well, for me, it adds a ton of immersion.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Bethesda half-assed starfield at almost every point they could. I’ve intentionally never bought the game because I knew I’d get a more fleshed out spacefaring experience with almost any other dev.
Hell, a Minecraft spacefaring mod would be more entertaining, from the gameplay footage I’ve seen.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 days ago
Especially when they knew it wouldn’t have it before the game even launched.
KiwiTB@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yaaaay, now we can do something Frontier could do 33 years ago, yaaaaaay!