I’ll stick with Elite Dangerous. Can already do this, and it has a whole galaxy to explore, and costs like $15. And it doesn’t have tons of bugs and crashes… and works great on Linux.
Upcoming Starfield mod introduces seamless planet landing - by Frederik Wessberg
Submitted 3 days ago by HiroK@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://i.imgur.com/57H8XYC.gifv
Comments
luthis@lemmy.nz 2 days ago
1984@lemmy.today 2 days ago
I played elite dangerous for a while, was fun. But I got tired of griding for new ships. I was just going out to kill ships for money all the time. I dont remember exploring much… What is there to explore?
storm_shadow@piefed.social 2 days ago
What is there to explore?
A whole galaxy…
…of the same 5 types of solar systems, 5 types of tasks and 5 types of stations with randomized distances in between.
Soulphite@reddthat.com 2 days ago
ED is OG too. One of the pioneers.
kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 2 days ago
A) That was not seamless. There was an artificial cloud layer as the loading seam.
B) That was the least realistic entry I have ever seen in any media. How are you gonna go from orbit to the ground thrusting toward the ground (at a really steep angle too) the entire way down. You would be either be letting the atmosphere slow you down with friction or thrusting away from the planet the entire time to counter gravity.
C) How was it hovering flat to the ground midair with the only visible thrusters being in thw rear of the ship? Also those thrusters were still firing but the hovering ship wasn’t moving forward.
Romkslrqusz@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Keep in mind that, as outlined in the title, this is a work in progress mod.
A) The unmodified game still has to load the game world during the transition. True seamless probably requires an engine overhaul beyond the scope of a mod, cloud cover to mask the loading of assets and make it feel seamless is a fair compromise.
B) I think that forcing a completely realistic re-entry would be a bit much for most players, though it would be awesome for the option to be available to those who want a hardcore experience.
KSP, Flight of Nova, Elite: Dangerous - there are plenty sims out there catering to those who want realism.
No Man’s Sky compromises on this to keep the game casual and fun.
C) In the original game, flight is limited to space and is very arcade-y. Press ‘W’ to activate thrusters and move forward. Vertical thrusters are present in the unmodified game and visible during landing cutscenes, so the modder may be able to tap into those animations as they continue work on the mod. I recall most of those thrusters being attached to the landing gear though.
At the end of the day, this is a game and most games are more enjoyable when you suspend disbelief. This is a game where people wear spacesuits in a vacuum, get shot multiple times with blood effects, and carry on fighting without experiencing violent depressurization.
Pratai@piefed.ca 2 days ago
Too bad that game is an unstable mess. It could have been something good.
WanderWisley@lemmy.world 2 days ago
[deleted]Famko@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Are you mixing up Starfield with Star Citizen? Starfield is already out, it was just kinda mediocre.
SuspiciousCatThing@pawb.social 2 days ago
That’s Star Citizen
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 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!
Varesti@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Yaaaay, now we can do something No Man’s Sky could do 10 years ago, yaaaaaaay!
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Sure, some games have features others don’t. I’m just surprised its a big deal for so many.
KiwiTB@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yaaaay, now we can do something Frontier could do 33 years ago, yaaaaaay!
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
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’.
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.
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.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Still haven’t bought it…I tried at launch. Laughed and cried, then refunded. How is it now? Except the unchangeable fundamental flaw (to me!) of procedural generation.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 days ago
Nothing has changed enough to make it worth checking out again. If you didn’t like it at launch, you still won’t like it now.
zikzak025@lemmy.world 2 days ago
This. I played it a bit at launch and gave it another fair shake recently. There were some QoL mods that fixed a few major issues I had with the game, and some of the updates they added since were appreciated.
But I think the game is just flawed at its core. It’s got a lot of neat set dressing around it, but it’s missing some key central pillars to support its gameplay loop. I can’t say it’s a bad game because I still ended up sinking a good few hours into it, but both times I walked away from it, it was from inability to find motivation to continue.
For me at least, I think I couldn’t stop comparing its various systems to better games.
I could play Starfield for the story and RPG mechanics, or I could play Cyberpunk 2077.
I could play Starfield for the planetary exploration, or I could play No Man’s Sky.
I could play Starfield for the base building and resource economy, or I could play Satisfactory.
And now none of those other games individually attempted to do what Starfield did, which you think might still give Starfield a niche of its own. But when all of these systems in Starfield just don’t really cross one another and just sit in isolation, it means you’re basically playing several “meh” games instead of one decent one.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Well, if you ignore mods maybe. But now there are a lot of mods that can fix everything. The problem is it is pretty time consuming to get all the mods set up and its not very user friendly to need to use mods from the start of the game.
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I dunno if I may have liked it. Had sound-issues and performance was a joke. The procedural flaw was noticable fast and no mods will fix. But the mod-scene seems active and considering that skyrim was bland crap without mods…
HiroK@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It depends on where you go and how you interact with the game content, main story is the weakest part of Starfield you want to do it up to a point if you care about unlocking some extra gameplay features. Other than that, the factions storylines are much better and really fun. Also the game has few very good side quests you can google to find where they are and just go do them.
The procedural generation only control where and what POI spawn at the zone you land inside. The POIs themselves are handcrafted and they are actually well made. They are some of the best bethesda ever created in terms of dungeons and locations to explore, many of them are massive, detailed, full of stuff and pretty unique.
The problem is if you visit a POI once then if it spawn again you don’t want to revisit it, because the PG won’t change anything in the POI and they will feel very repetitive.
The latest update has added a few really good stuff too by introducing a new resource called X-Tech which has big effect on your character weapons, ships and powers. You get it from multiple sources, but most importantly you get it as a reward at the end of a POI. So, now you have this extra incentive and nice reward for exploring these POIs.
It also add a feature of the same handcrafted POIs to space through the new Free Lanes feature. Same thing apply on the planets POIs. They are really well made, but if you run into one you did before skip it.
It’s overall a 7 out of 10 game sometimes even less, but you know there’s some stuff that really fun and well done inside it if you manage to find it
BigBananaDealer@lemmy.world 2 days ago
being critical id give it as high as an 8 and as low as a 6. you could argue 5 and personally for me its a 9 but anything below 5 is just a broken ratings scale
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Thanks for the details. So the POIs are great once and maybe even twice but that’s it about the “endless space” basically.
So mainly story and discovering all POIs plus a metric ton of mods to pimp it up. 7/10 is kinda okay, unless you already use 583820 mods 😁
FenrirIII@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I also haven’t bought it, but have played it a few times via the high seas (and never finished). Two years post release was better, though mostly due to mods.
There’s a Star Wars conversion underway across many mods. It added some life but didn’t map precisely to the game (especially voice lines differing from the text). It’s still going and may sway me to buy it for $20.
thessnake03@lemmy.world 2 days ago
So timely!
42yeah@eviltoast.org 2 days ago
It’s such an intrgral feature for space flight games (IMO) and it saddens me to see that after all these years they still haven’t implemented it, and the community has to step in.
Zorque@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Isn’t that pretty par for the course with mainline Bethesda games?
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 2 days ago
i just think the entire idea of spreading out a Bathesda RPG over an entire galaxy was just a bad idea even if it had seamless planet landing from the beginning. constantly flying between solar systems for different quests, often in the same quest, is just tedious as hell even if it was seamless.
Kirp123@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Not to mention most of the planets are randomly generated. There aren’t really any unique things to discover, just the same buildings randomly pasted around. Even the planets that are supposed to be unique like the capitals of the factions are so underwhelming. You’re telling me that this interstellar faction that rules over a dozen planets is run out of a dingy Western looking ass town with 300 inhabitants?
toxicbubble@lemmy.world 2 days ago
those starving indie devs…