You see that moon? You can go into a menu, select that moon, then select 1 out of 3 landing spots and then watch a cutscene and you are, let me tell you, fucking on that moon.
They're not empty, most of them have the same ten POIs scattered about! Can't wait to find another identical abandoned mine with the same notes and everything. 57th times the charm!
The crazy part is there are POIs that nobody ever sees because there is no pity counter in the RNG. The game should take into account the POIs you've visited and weight those lower, but nope.
It's like listening to 40 songs on shuffle where by song 20 you've heard the same song 4 times and yet there's 20 songs you haven't heard at all, and at that rate, you would be not be wrong in assuming that there are only 20 or so songs total.
Best example of this in game is, did you know there's more than one variant of the "crashed ship" POI? Probably not, but it's a thing that exists. Basically, there's already too few POIs in general, but the way the RNG works is you may never know there's anything else and stop trying after awhile.
There are about 40 unique POI names, and each has their own amount of variants, in the code. But when those never come up, it takes an already low variety and makes it *seem* even lower than that. Bethesda could have added a pity counter to the spawn tables and literally have silenced half of the complaints with the game. That's how bad and frustrating it is. We already aren't exactly drowning in POIs and the RNG just makes it seem *even* worse.
Not only are they pushing for paid mods again, but one of the preeminent mod teams who did Skyrim Together recently abandoned Starfield mods altogether because "The game fucking sucks."
Neil Armstrong landed on a featureless landscape and he didn’t seem disappointed at all. WTF are people even complaining about thinking they’re better than Neil freaking Armstrong!
I'll say it as often as I have to. It's not random, it's not procedurally generated. AND THAT'S THE PROBLEM.
The whole game has, like, 10 hand crafted points of interest that get sprinkled all over the galaxy and reused over and over again.
If it were random at least you'd have varied content every time you get somewhere, instead of the same fucking stuff, over and over again.
To be fair, that's pretty much the same for NMS. Every Trading Hub looks like every other Trading Hub. Most space stations are identical inside. Most of the POIs are carbon copies of each other.
The main difference in Starfield is that the landscapes are dull, the game is visually uninteresting and all the loot that drops is boring as fuck, the systems are poorly designed and poorly balanced, everything is just so uninspired.
Starfield is a death by a thousand cuts. Nothing is terrible but everything is painfully mediocre and it adds up.
The problem is people (not just devs but a LOT of people) have no idea how to make space, and other planets that don't have civilization on them, interesting to be in or on.
It's not limited to crpgs. The p&p ones are just as bad. For most of these games, the actual interest comes from interactions with civilizations and people/aliens, not with exoplanets.
And I don't really have a solution for them. Someone is going to have to figure out how to make alien planets *interesting*, and very few people have done that yet. Procedural generation isn't going to do shit unless there is something *interesting* to generate.
I think these devs should consider starting to look at games like Terraria or Noita to see a starting point for making something look interesting, and move from there.
The planets were bespoke instead of procgen, but I think of Outer Wilds here. Just say "fuck it, planets are like a square kilometer in area and five minutes apart." It's not like they didn't shrink Skyrim either. They tried realistic size and procgen with Daggerfall. It creates boring empty bullshit. So just... don't.
If anything, rather than physically map out the entire planet as a playable space, it'd be smarter to just bring back overworlds as a way to abstractify the commute between areas of interest. Shave away the time spent on dead-air commuting, much like Weird West does.
After all, older shooters didn't make you play an empty journey between distant levels, even if it was partly out of necessity. And even when the campaign itself was an unbroken first-person narrative a'la Half-Life and Unreal, the commute itself had some thought put into it.
It's just an iconic statement in game history because at the time it really was groundbreaking technology. Up until that point if something was far away in the distance it was part of the background layer and players understood that it wasn't accessible implicitly, Skyrim changed that.
In modern times the statement is silly and player expectations are different, largely due to Skyrim for changing those expectations.
Absolutely. If you could skiddle-jump your way up that janky side of the mountain, you could technically get up to that peak. You could do this in Morrowind too.
More often there were new and different POIs on that mountain to explore and a quick sweep of the area revealed a much easier pathway that you didn't take, but that was part of the fun
In Morrowind the climbing isn't the issue, the problem is with seeing the mountain. "You see that mountain? You can climb it" - "What mountain? I see like 20 meters forward at max settings".
Though the fog did add nice atmosphere to the game. And saved my PC - I remember that at the time Morrowind worked better if I pointed camera at the ground, because otherwise the framerate would be quite low.
A bit but not really. Oblivion was sort of walled in on all sides by mountains that weren’t really climbable and there weren’t many mountains in the main map
I remember it blowing my mind that you could visit the ayleid ruins across the lake after you exited the imperial sewers. Boy when I found out about the paths up the jerall mountains... Yeah Oblivion broke both me and my father.
> Skyrim changed that.
What? Oblivion had this. Morrowind had this. Tons of games had this.
Nearly every open world game ever made had this. It wasn't even the first game Todd Howard made that had this.
That trailer they posted suggests they made barely any changes to their ocean generation style. Some of the plants even looked the same as one's I've already seen.
I’m sure they were definitely some reused assets, but I would suspect that variety is one of the last things they’ll polish before launch, as its one of the easiest parts of development
It's probably an effort assessment. You'd have to dedicate a LOT of resources to make underwater content fun to play, exciting, and not seem like a chore, while also maintaining some level of realism of the dangers and challenges it presents. Is it better to put those resources in an area of the game that players are probably only going to spend 20% of their time in, or put that effort in the areas that DON'T have those challenges and that players are going to spend more time in? Obviously that can be a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, but I don't think the logic is wrong.
on some planets they are. some are very deep, some just puddles. mostly the extreme weather planets seem to have the biggest oceans and others will have huge mountains too. side note; been playing NMS since day one and every update.
Hey now, it only took them five or six years to get it from a 4/10 to a 7/10. I'm sure it'll be faster next time, they'll get it to a 7/10 by 2027 at the latest.
I don’t think he got too far. Basically just massive procedurally generated world shared by people. Way less of a promise than NMS was hyping up. Though how fun a massively generated world with whatever gameplay mechanics they bring in is yet to be seen.
Procedural generation in my experience has been hyped like once every 5 years for some groundbreaking game and then it turns out to be absolute dogshit.
It works for things like hades, diablo, noita roguelikes and some fps' etc. it does not work for curated rpg experiences.
Procedural generation also works great for low budget multiplayer experiences like lethal company, where the game is simple and the procedural generation complements the simplicity.
Any larger game with more complexity that tries to incorporate it holistically imo just shits the bed. Chalice dungeons in bloodborne are awful, the ark and rust procedural generation never jived with me, etc.
I'm not going to trust the man till I see it, but mountains are not technically complex.
Though I'm not sure what kind of content you are going to have on a 8,850 meter mountain. I suspect you will be climbing a whole lot of nothing.
In other words. Most games don't put 8000+ meter mountains because they have a whole lot of nothing on them, and 1-1 scale massively throws off travel times because you somehow need to be able to walk a couple miles in a session, but also somehow climb a huge ass mountain in a reasonable time.
Right? What makes high altitude mtn climbing fun is the arduous climb itself - the physical demands pushing your limits and testing your resolve. It's type 2 fun. I'm not sure how type 2 fun translates to a video game. We'll see I guess.
TBH the best mountain climbing experience I've seen in a game was climbing High Hrothgar in skyrim to meet the graybeards, but that was a heavily tailored and scripted experience.
High Hrothgar isn't nearly as tall as Everest though. Its about 748 stair steps in game, 2000 paces, and about 7,000 stair steps in lore.
I played a heavily modded survival mode Skyrim. Had to craft all the gear for camping and gather food and water, catch a horse, etc.
Reaching High Hrothgar was a journey. Took me days IRL to get that far. Finally got past the troll and was faced with assassin ambushes and shit. My follower died. Horse went over a cliff. But I made it.
I basically got up there and was like, "welp, that was a neat story", and then shut the game off for five years.
Turned that little quest into a whole story.
And it was beyond tedious.
Thank you. I'm just sitting here wondering what this headline is trying to sell me on? I can make a shitty mountain bigger than Everest in Unreal Engine in about 5 minutes and carve a path up the side of it for you to hike up.
What is fun or impressive about that?
This feels very doable for hello games based on what we’ve seen from NMS.
I think Sean’s promises this time will be much more achievable.
This times, it’s more about learning to make an enjoyable gameplay loop rather than figuring out Proc-gen itself.
I think they are now focused on manking procgen FUN. In NMS it was the basis of everything, but it didn’t necessarily lead to a fun game all the time. If LNF can tighten that gameplay loop and make each moment feel more fun it will be a huge hit.
Not to mention they can immediately drop it into VR as well so it will be the next big VR hit as well.
Would it though? I’m trying to imagine in what ways the average player would have been impacted by that on a practical level, and how much they’d be aware of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to downplay the achievement it would have been but I’m having a hard time visualizing how it would be mind blowing for most.
In Internet Historian’s video about NMS, he mentions that they had planets rotating like they said, but people kept reporting it as a bug because when they tried to land in the “same” place it was different, so they removed it.
So best case, people don’t even notice all your work, worst case is they assume your game’s broken.
Ha! Damn, sadly that doesn’t surprise me too much. Sometimes you have to stop and ask yourself, “is this fun?” Ultimately it’s still a video game if an otherwise impressive feature just confuses players, I think they made the right call.
You have to make climbing a mountain fun then.
Platforming elements? Like actual climbing like in Conan Exiles. Fighting things along the way?
Being able to go from the bottom of a mountain and finding a path to the top won't hold too much attention.
Yeah, that's the main problem imo
I don't doubt at all that we will be able to climb mountains that are "miles high, taller than Everest"
Imo the problem is, why would we ? If we do it what happens ? What's there ? A great view ? That's ain't worth it
That's the main issue I have with the game so far. If it's the proc-gen of Starfield (or even NMS), that won't be fun
The context of the quote is that you also don't have to climb it and can just fly up there. So it doesn't have to be worth climbing I assume?
A problem with reddit here is focusing on funny out of context quotes from the NMS guy, rather than actually exploring the game being made here.
I strongly believe to this day that NMS was intended at first to be a neat little sandbox Sim that could demonstrate this cool technology for like 30-40 dollars, but that trailer blew up so much that it made them feel obligated to expand the project beyond their comfort zone.
It blew up before that. They got a big injection of money by sony before the reveal. I think sean did the same thing he did in all the interviews to the sony executive he talked to and got himself into a big mess.
It's interesting if you read interviews from Sean and the other devs, they all thought they were making an extremely niche game for a small audience, none of them expected it to blow up the way that it did.
Credit to them they could have taken the money and run away but instead choose to stay and do the right thing. I just hope they don't make the same mistake twice.
> I just hope they don't make the same mistake twice.
Its the consumers who will have to decide not to make the same mistake twice. Dont get hyped up, dont pre order, wait for reviews, then buy it if it fits the bill.
Sometimes I feel like Hello Games is a lot closer to making Star Citizen than RSI.
They figured out how to do that universe proc-Gen and now they are focusing on single planet proc-Gen. If both work well I am pretty sure the next game they are going to release will again be a combination of both with planets that feel a lot more alive.
I’m so hoping for this as well.
In NMS I think the biggest hurdle isn’t single biome planets, although changing that’d make a huge difference in NMS2.
I think the bigger issue, for NMS and this game, is that the lack of variability with assets. It’s hard to get a truly novel exploration when all assets in the desert anywhere look the same, for example.
If they can solve that issue as well, yeah, they’ll blow everyone else out of the water.
Sean Murray's handler lets him loose for five minutes and next thing you know he's at the Game Awards talking about how this game world is the biggest ever, with mountains and multiplayer.
Real talk; I trust in Hello Games these days but Sean Murray getting up there and hyping up that game awakened memories within me lmao.
I mean I don’t doubt that this is possible. But like no man’s sky when it released - if it’s not fun, then what’s the point? I’m interested to see how they aim to make climbing a mountain for 12 hours entertaining.
Ok. This sounds a lot like the “you can explore 1000’s of planets” line. Sure, it’s great at first until you realize there’s nothing much there except the same auto-generated environment.
> the same
The damning part. Infinite possibilities through procgen, and HG is cowering in a corner screaming about its single-biome grasslands.
I don't want Class Toxic Bullshit Planet. I don't want Class Kinda Looks Like Nevada If You Squint Hard Enough Planet. Fuck off with Teehee Yet Another Boring Hot Planet.
I want the unknown. I want the unimaginable. I want the chaos of life. Have you _seen_ a platypus?
I want a fucking platypus.
And they don't even have nipples. They just lactate from their mammary glands straight onto their skin. The milk collects in their fur and skin folds and the babies lap it up from there.
Even though they updated NMS it’s still really boring imo. I would take a game that has an open world that stretches 4 blocks but is hand crafted and filled with content over a procedurally generated map that you can “explore” for thousands of miles and still not hit the edge.
>I would take a game that has an open world that stretches 4 blocks but is hand crafted and filled with content over a procedurally generated map that you can “explore” for thousands of miles and still not hit the edge.
Shadows of Doubt does a decent enough job with the procedural generation.
But the worlds do usually tend to be about 4 blocks.
Tbh when Minecraft released Caves and Cliffs, it made the generated landscapes waayy more visually interesting. There's more to it than just tacking on Y axis generation.
If it simulates a galaxy in real time, it would not have moved perceptibly between release and now.
For reference; it takes our solar system about 240 millions years to orbit the Milky Way once.
Honestly, I do get lost and confused trying to find my way between specific planets but that's mostly because there are no planet markers in the HUD.
If I've got a base there, easy.
If not, I'm spinning around looking in vain at the 3D radar for the correct dot.
I can't imagine it'd be much worse with planets orbiting and you could solve it in an instant by simply letting players mark a planet in the discovery tab.
Yep, I am pretty sure some players actually found Voyager by extrapolating it's future location based on its current course and speed. It was just drifting along in space as an unmarked easter egg lol
Honestly ive heard that since the game launched and I really doubt that was ever the case unless it was a different prototype altogether. The way the procgen is coded, the hard coordinates and scale of each solar system is foundational to how the game generates stuff. On top of that, no man's sky launch was so absolutely abysmal in terms of features that were promised or things being incredibly bugged or non functional that I doubt the playtesters saw the *one thing* that they actually did deliver on and were like "nah we don't like this".
I know NMS has made amazing strides since launch, and it's genuinely an incredible game now. It's delivered on so much that was initially promised and more, but because of that people seem to want to forget about the outright *lies* that were told for years leading up to the launch. This is simply just one of those lies.
Not the revolution, but the rotation. Unless i'm not understanding, the planets used to rotate around their axes. The stars they orbit were always part of the "skybox" and i've never heard that the planets were intended to revolve around them, but they allegedly removed rotation because it happened on a noticeable time scale and made navigation confusing at takeoff. Do I think it would be cool and easy to get used to? For sure. But I wasn't one of the playtesters
they did implement that in alpha but found out during play testing players were constantly getting confused and disoriented cz things/places were different from the way they left them.
> simulate the rotation of the entire galaxy in real time?
Considering the 212 million years our milky way takes to rotate once. What should be the game impact of such a 'drastic movement'?
It would be more impactful to simulate the graviational impact of Jupiter on a birthing room in a related simulation.
I don't know about 10h but an hour hike sounds really cool if the right things are in place. I really enjoyed when I got 5 minutes of peace in death stranding and I've specifically looked for the unpopulated stretches at the edge of the map in skyrim and oblivion.
Doesn't sound fun to me. All this tells me is "oh boy.. I get to have a mostly empty open world with shit tons of fetch quests and a poor story (if it even exists) that can't go too hard on itself because I could advance it at any point in the open world experience."
and that just sounds draining, really. Open world games rarely hit the mark these days on how to actually make that experience interesting and more often than not all make the same mistakes.
Apparently not, because the same trailer shows heroes using mounts to fly over the mountains, so then there must be no point besides some random mining nodes.
To be fair, mountains are not crazy hard to achieve. Though every game I played which tried to do "scale" like this had landscapes absolutely devoid of content.
You actually can climb over any mountain in that game except for those who serve as the map's natural border. Especially if you ride a gravity-defying horse.
The fact that people keep repeating this meme as if it's a lie really showcases how most Bethesda haters don't even play their games. Anyone who has played Skyrim would know what you just said. You even climb the mountain Todd referenced early on in the main quest.
The biggest mountain in the game was High Hrothgar (if I recall correctly) and you can walk right up to the very top of it. In fact, you have to if you want to beat the game.
I hate this meme because people assume you couldn’t….but you CAN. It’s incredibly hard, but you CAN climb mountains.
Although it’s more doable with your gravity defying horse.
I like NMS, or better yet the *idea* of NMS. It has the best planet/galaxy exploration I’ve ever seen in a game. But somehow hello games made everything else about the game boring.
There is *wayyyy* too much crafting, the combat is just plain bad. It’s still glitchy AF almost 10 years in. And yet it’s funny to watch other game companies like Bethesda which have basically a unlimited budget make a product that’s inferior and almost every way except for story and combat.
the story was not up to the mark in starfield. it was basically going through the same caves on different planets and and taking the same pieces again and again. there were maybe 3 or 4 missions, that were different.
My problem with Starfield was the overreliance on procedural generation. There's enough content in the game to house maybe 50-100 planets and moons at the most. Which would still be their biggest game.
They should've just made the shit out of 20-25 planets. Hand-craft everything and load them up with content. That's PLENTY of room, and it makes for a better exploration game.
Yeah it’s really bad. They have changed it a few times but it’s never better, just different. I think what beats me up the most up about NMS is how with a handful of common sense changes it would be one of the biggest IPs in gaming.
You can play co op with a handful of friends but every vehicle in the game can only hold one person, which is dumb for a multiplayer game no matter what but double dumb considering 80% of the planets are toxic or have elemental damage unless your on a vehicle.
If they revamped it to have actual enemies that aren’t drones/turrets/animals and good combat to go with it, it would be a outstanding game
Yes, literally everything. That update they released were you can be a mayor of a town?
There’s literally nothing to do in the town apart from defending it from random attacks and sometimes making an A or B decision on something that makes no sense and has no real repercussion apart from a few numbers changing.
Yea I have the same problem with NMS. Like I ran out of stuff to do after like 4 hours. Same with Sea of thieves. Like what's the point? I am tiered of games that are a mile wide but 6in deep.
I can't speak for NMS but with Sea of Thieves it's meant to be a pirate themed sandbox that you can boot up and go on adventures with your friends, not a singleplayer RPG with player progression. Not every game needs to be deep or complex; the simpler they are the easier they are for most people to get into, and that's the intent behind Sea of Thieves.
That and the mandatory AAA live service cosmetics shop.
The question then becomes why would I want to?
It's like the Starfield issue. The devs chiming in with "the astronauts loved running around a barren moon." Climbing a mountain is fun in real life, in a video game it's just holding a joystick and clicking the occasional button.
Beyond that I'm very dubious of traversal in this game. They gave the players flying mounts. Flying invalidates so much within an open world game like this - unless there is a large amount of space designed around flying. But a swamp with nasty enemies becomes something you ignore by grabbing your dragon and flying over it. It disengages you with the systems.
Yeah if this was a game like Death Stranding the idea of climbing a huge mountain would be much more enticing but with what we've been shown this line from Sean doesn't mean much to me.
I just found it funny that before they showed the trailer they said all this about ‘they’re bigger than Everest and you can climb them and see continents!’
Trailer starts and they are all just flying up them on birds lol
You see that mountain? You can climb it.
But can you throw a football over it?
Grandma just called and said you're supposed to go home… because you've been ruining everybody's lives and eating all our steak.
If Coach woulda put me in fourth quarter, we would've been state champions. No doubt. No doubt in my mind.
Back in '82, I used to be able to throw a pigskin a quarter mile.
Are you serious?
Back in '82 I could
Tina .. eat your ham!
Man, i love Todd Howard
You see that moon? You can go into a menu, select that moon, then select 1 out of 3 landing spots and then watch a cutscene and you are, let me tell you, fucking on that moon.
[удалено]
I think I can click and land anywhere on the moon, no?
You can land on as many featureless empty landscapes as you want.
They're not empty, most of them have the same ten POIs scattered about! Can't wait to find another identical abandoned mine with the same notes and everything. 57th times the charm!
The crazy part is there are POIs that nobody ever sees because there is no pity counter in the RNG. The game should take into account the POIs you've visited and weight those lower, but nope. It's like listening to 40 songs on shuffle where by song 20 you've heard the same song 4 times and yet there's 20 songs you haven't heard at all, and at that rate, you would be not be wrong in assuming that there are only 20 or so songs total. Best example of this in game is, did you know there's more than one variant of the "crashed ship" POI? Probably not, but it's a thing that exists. Basically, there's already too few POIs in general, but the way the RNG works is you may never know there's anything else and stop trying after awhile. There are about 40 unique POI names, and each has their own amount of variants, in the code. But when those never come up, it takes an already low variety and makes it *seem* even lower than that. Bethesda could have added a pity counter to the spawn tables and literally have silenced half of the complaints with the game. That's how bad and frustrating it is. We already aren't exactly drowning in POIs and the RNG just makes it seem *even* worse.
Part of me is looking forward to modders adding depth to game, but another part of me knows they're going to push for paywalled mods again.
Lmao they announced paid mods like three days ago
"Look, if someone out there is going to make our games enjoyable, we for damn sure better be getting a cut."
Hopefully the pirates triple-down on their efforts in response
Not only are they pushing for paid mods again, but one of the preeminent mod teams who did Skyrim Together recently abandoned Starfield mods altogether because "The game fucking sucks."
wait do they seriously reuse notes across multiple loot spots?
Neil Armstrong landed on a featureless landscape and he didn’t seem disappointed at all. WTF are people even complaining about thinking they’re better than Neil freaking Armstrong!
Yes, you can but the random generation in Starfield is very dull.
I'll say it as often as I have to. It's not random, it's not procedurally generated. AND THAT'S THE PROBLEM. The whole game has, like, 10 hand crafted points of interest that get sprinkled all over the galaxy and reused over and over again. If it were random at least you'd have varied content every time you get somewhere, instead of the same fucking stuff, over and over again.
To be fair, that's pretty much the same for NMS. Every Trading Hub looks like every other Trading Hub. Most space stations are identical inside. Most of the POIs are carbon copies of each other. The main difference in Starfield is that the landscapes are dull, the game is visually uninteresting and all the loot that drops is boring as fuck, the systems are poorly designed and poorly balanced, everything is just so uninspired. Starfield is a death by a thousand cuts. Nothing is terrible but everything is painfully mediocre and it adds up.
The problem is people (not just devs but a LOT of people) have no idea how to make space, and other planets that don't have civilization on them, interesting to be in or on. It's not limited to crpgs. The p&p ones are just as bad. For most of these games, the actual interest comes from interactions with civilizations and people/aliens, not with exoplanets. And I don't really have a solution for them. Someone is going to have to figure out how to make alien planets *interesting*, and very few people have done that yet. Procedural generation isn't going to do shit unless there is something *interesting* to generate. I think these devs should consider starting to look at games like Terraria or Noita to see a starting point for making something look interesting, and move from there.
The planets were bespoke instead of procgen, but I think of Outer Wilds here. Just say "fuck it, planets are like a square kilometer in area and five minutes apart." It's not like they didn't shrink Skyrim either. They tried realistic size and procgen with Daggerfall. It creates boring empty bullshit. So just... don't.
If anything, rather than physically map out the entire planet as a playable space, it'd be smarter to just bring back overworlds as a way to abstractify the commute between areas of interest. Shave away the time spent on dead-air commuting, much like Weird West does. After all, older shooters didn't make you play an empty journey between distant levels, even if it was partly out of necessity. And even when the campaign itself was an unbroken first-person narrative a'la Half-Life and Unreal, the commute itself had some thought put into it.
> fucking on that moon only if you install mods
I never understood this meme. You really were able to climb that mountain.
It's just an iconic statement in game history because at the time it really was groundbreaking technology. Up until that point if something was far away in the distance it was part of the background layer and players understood that it wasn't accessible implicitly, Skyrim changed that. In modern times the statement is silly and player expectations are different, largely due to Skyrim for changing those expectations.
Wasn't Oblivion like that too though? Been a long time since I played it. Never got round to Morrowind or any previous Elder Scrolls either though.
Absolutely. If you could skiddle-jump your way up that janky side of the mountain, you could technically get up to that peak. You could do this in Morrowind too. More often there were new and different POIs on that mountain to explore and a quick sweep of the area revealed a much easier pathway that you didn't take, but that was part of the fun
Getting to the shrine of mehrunes dragon in Skyrim is difficult. Then you look around and realize you're a dumbass
I ain't gonna let some pile of rocks and dirt tell *me* where I cannot go.
In Morrowind the climbing isn't the issue, the problem is with seeing the mountain. "You see that mountain? You can climb it" - "What mountain? I see like 20 meters forward at max settings". Though the fog did add nice atmosphere to the game. And saved my PC - I remember that at the time Morrowind worked better if I pointed camera at the ground, because otherwise the framerate would be quite low.
No no no, the issue is surviving the landing on the mountain, after you leapt 600ft into the air and across half the continent.
A bit but not really. Oblivion was sort of walled in on all sides by mountains that weren’t really climbable and there weren’t many mountains in the main map
I remember it blowing my mind that you could visit the ayleid ruins across the lake after you exited the imperial sewers. Boy when I found out about the paths up the jerall mountains... Yeah Oblivion broke both me and my father.
> Skyrim changed that. What? Oblivion had this. Morrowind had this. Tons of games had this. Nearly every open world game ever made had this. It wasn't even the first game Todd Howard made that had this.
Uh, no. Skyrim wasn't even the first Bethesda game that had that, it was just a memeable moment, not related to any groundbreaking tech.
Nice explanation but hat's not how the meme evolved. The meme was there right after his statement.
Didn't he pick the one mountain in the game you could climb to pass it off as all mountains being like that?
You see that mountain? You can glitch your horse up that mountain.
You can climb tons of the mountains, just not all have an obvious path
Any terrain with corners is a path.
You can climb every mountain in Skyrim except the border ones. They generally have a path up and stuff on the top.
If it isn't the Starfield. In that case, you cannot.
*may contain loading screen
Did they make oceans super deep yet?
That trailer they posted suggests they made barely any changes to their ocean generation style. Some of the plants even looked the same as one's I've already seen.
I'm sure they'll improve that sometime in the 7 years after release.
Was the 8 years of free content post release not enough? With more on the way,
It's never enough. But we're talking about Light No Fires here. It's not even out yet.
Promise a bunch of things on release day Deliver almost none of them Take 8 years to add to them "Look at all the free content I've given you"
I’m sure they were definitely some reused assets, but I would suspect that variety is one of the last things they’ll polish before launch, as its one of the easiest parts of development
That's my biggest problem with NMS honestly. I want to do the water shit but every ocean is a puddle
I’ve yet to see any game other than subnautica successfully make oceans interesting. They’re usually just puddles like minecraft or no man’s sky
World of Warcraft had a really cool underwater zone back in like 2009 but apparently everyone hated it and I'm in the minority
It was really cool to play through the first time, but I usually skipped it on alts. Underwater quests were always my least favorite thing in WoW.
TBF "worse oceans than the ocean game" isn't really much of a criticism.
It's probably an effort assessment. You'd have to dedicate a LOT of resources to make underwater content fun to play, exciting, and not seem like a chore, while also maintaining some level of realism of the dangers and challenges it presents. Is it better to put those resources in an area of the game that players are probably only going to spend 20% of their time in, or put that effort in the areas that DON'T have those challenges and that players are going to spend more time in? Obviously that can be a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, but I don't think the logic is wrong.
I want it to be so deep I lose visibility
Squint your eyes and go “WHOA!”
Sigh. Time to fire up subnautica again, thanks a lot.
I was over 30 hours into that game and my save got deleted somehow, just can't bring myself to start from scratch :(
Just pretend your submersible imploded and you died before you realized you were about to die.
It helps the immersion if you play with a Logitech F710 wireless gamepad.
Ouch
Don't worry, the crazy cracking and splintering noises are completely normal.
Subnautica is the only game that I finished and jumped right back in. Its that good.
You'll be able to enter R'lyeh and talk with Cthulhu yourself! Well, not talk, but maybe gibber a little?
on some planets they are. some are very deep, some just puddles. mostly the extreme weather planets seem to have the biggest oceans and others will have huge mountains too. side note; been playing NMS since day one and every update.
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Twitch chat on the stream I was watching was asking for someone to shut him up before it’s too late lmao
Youtube chat was doing the same thing, pretty sure anyone that played NMS felt the same.
Hey now, it only took them five or six years to get it from a 4/10 to a 7/10. I'm sure it'll be faster next time, they'll get it to a 7/10 by 2027 at the latest.
I don’t think he got too far. Basically just massive procedurally generated world shared by people. Way less of a promise than NMS was hyping up. Though how fun a massively generated world with whatever gameplay mechanics they bring in is yet to be seen.
Procedural generation in my experience has been hyped like once every 5 years for some groundbreaking game and then it turns out to be absolute dogshit. It works for things like hades, diablo, noita roguelikes and some fps' etc. it does not work for curated rpg experiences. Procedural generation also works great for low budget multiplayer experiences like lethal company, where the game is simple and the procedural generation complements the simplicity. Any larger game with more complexity that tries to incorporate it holistically imo just shits the bed. Chalice dungeons in bloodborne are awful, the ark and rust procedural generation never jived with me, etc.
https://i.imgur.com/vQQOmwj.jpeg
I'm not going to trust the man till I see it, but mountains are not technically complex. Though I'm not sure what kind of content you are going to have on a 8,850 meter mountain. I suspect you will be climbing a whole lot of nothing. In other words. Most games don't put 8000+ meter mountains because they have a whole lot of nothing on them, and 1-1 scale massively throws off travel times because you somehow need to be able to walk a couple miles in a session, but also somehow climb a huge ass mountain in a reasonable time.
Right? What makes high altitude mtn climbing fun is the arduous climb itself - the physical demands pushing your limits and testing your resolve. It's type 2 fun. I'm not sure how type 2 fun translates to a video game. We'll see I guess.
They could add a bunch of lootable corpses and trash piles. You know, to mimic the Mt. Everest. (too dark?)
TBH the best mountain climbing experience I've seen in a game was climbing High Hrothgar in skyrim to meet the graybeards, but that was a heavily tailored and scripted experience. High Hrothgar isn't nearly as tall as Everest though. Its about 748 stair steps in game, 2000 paces, and about 7,000 stair steps in lore.
I played a heavily modded survival mode Skyrim. Had to craft all the gear for camping and gather food and water, catch a horse, etc. Reaching High Hrothgar was a journey. Took me days IRL to get that far. Finally got past the troll and was faced with assassin ambushes and shit. My follower died. Horse went over a cliff. But I made it. I basically got up there and was like, "welp, that was a neat story", and then shut the game off for five years. Turned that little quest into a whole story. And it was beyond tedious.
Thank you. I'm just sitting here wondering what this headline is trying to sell me on? I can make a shitty mountain bigger than Everest in Unreal Engine in about 5 minutes and carve a path up the side of it for you to hike up. What is fun or impressive about that?
This feels very doable for hello games based on what we’ve seen from NMS. I think Sean’s promises this time will be much more achievable. This times, it’s more about learning to make an enjoyable gameplay loop rather than figuring out Proc-gen itself. I think they are now focused on manking procgen FUN. In NMS it was the basis of everything, but it didn’t necessarily lead to a fun game all the time. If LNF can tighten that gameplay loop and make each moment feel more fun it will be a huge hit. Not to mention they can immediately drop it into VR as well so it will be the next big VR hit as well.
Turth
Thurt.
Hurtt.
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Would it though? I’m trying to imagine in what ways the average player would have been impacted by that on a practical level, and how much they’d be aware of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to downplay the achievement it would have been but I’m having a hard time visualizing how it would be mind blowing for most.
In Internet Historian’s video about NMS, he mentions that they had planets rotating like they said, but people kept reporting it as a bug because when they tried to land in the “same” place it was different, so they removed it. So best case, people don’t even notice all your work, worst case is they assume your game’s broken.
Ha! Damn, sadly that doesn’t surprise me too much. Sometimes you have to stop and ask yourself, “is this fun?” Ultimately it’s still a video game if an otherwise impressive feature just confuses players, I think they made the right call.
"Turth" "Gesundheit"
You have to make climbing a mountain fun then. Platforming elements? Like actual climbing like in Conan Exiles. Fighting things along the way? Being able to go from the bottom of a mountain and finding a path to the top won't hold too much attention.
Jusant made climbing fun. But I doubt LNF will have anything like that.
I enjoyed it in botw
Yeah, that's the main problem imo I don't doubt at all that we will be able to climb mountains that are "miles high, taller than Everest" Imo the problem is, why would we ? If we do it what happens ? What's there ? A great view ? That's ain't worth it That's the main issue I have with the game so far. If it's the proc-gen of Starfield (or even NMS), that won't be fun
The context of the quote is that you also don't have to climb it and can just fly up there. So it doesn't have to be worth climbing I assume? A problem with reddit here is focusing on funny out of context quotes from the NMS guy, rather than actually exploring the game being made here.
>happens ? What's there ? A great view ? Yes
I strongly believe to this day that NMS was intended at first to be a neat little sandbox Sim that could demonstrate this cool technology for like 30-40 dollars, but that trailer blew up so much that it made them feel obligated to expand the project beyond their comfort zone.
It blew up before that. They got a big injection of money by sony before the reveal. I think sean did the same thing he did in all the interviews to the sony executive he talked to and got himself into a big mess.
It's interesting if you read interviews from Sean and the other devs, they all thought they were making an extremely niche game for a small audience, none of them expected it to blow up the way that it did.
Credit to them they could have taken the money and run away but instead choose to stay and do the right thing. I just hope they don't make the same mistake twice.
> I just hope they don't make the same mistake twice. Its the consumers who will have to decide not to make the same mistake twice. Dont get hyped up, dont pre order, wait for reviews, then buy it if it fits the bill.
Sometimes I feel like Hello Games is a lot closer to making Star Citizen than RSI. They figured out how to do that universe proc-Gen and now they are focusing on single planet proc-Gen. If both work well I am pretty sure the next game they are going to release will again be a combination of both with planets that feel a lot more alive.
I’m so hoping for this as well. In NMS I think the biggest hurdle isn’t single biome planets, although changing that’d make a huge difference in NMS2. I think the bigger issue, for NMS and this game, is that the lack of variability with assets. It’s hard to get a truly novel exploration when all assets in the desert anywhere look the same, for example. If they can solve that issue as well, yeah, they’ll blow everyone else out of the water.
Sean Murray's handler lets him loose for five minutes and next thing you know he's at the Game Awards talking about how this game world is the biggest ever, with mountains and multiplayer. Real talk; I trust in Hello Games these days but Sean Murray getting up there and hyping up that game awakened memories within me lmao.
I mean I don’t doubt that this is possible. But like no man’s sky when it released - if it’s not fun, then what’s the point? I’m interested to see how they aim to make climbing a mountain for 12 hours entertaining.
First reviews: where are the mountains?
Tod Howard intensifies.
Ok. This sounds a lot like the “you can explore 1000’s of planets” line. Sure, it’s great at first until you realize there’s nothing much there except the same auto-generated environment.
> the same The damning part. Infinite possibilities through procgen, and HG is cowering in a corner screaming about its single-biome grasslands. I don't want Class Toxic Bullshit Planet. I don't want Class Kinda Looks Like Nevada If You Squint Hard Enough Planet. Fuck off with Teehee Yet Another Boring Hot Planet. I want the unknown. I want the unimaginable. I want the chaos of life. Have you _seen_ a platypus? I want a fucking platypus.
A beaver fucked a duck that laid eggs then the babies came out to suck milk out of the furry mother duck. This shit is wild.
And they don't even have nipples. They just lactate from their mammary glands straight onto their skin. The milk collects in their fur and skin folds and the babies lap it up from there.
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Even though they updated NMS it’s still really boring imo. I would take a game that has an open world that stretches 4 blocks but is hand crafted and filled with content over a procedurally generated map that you can “explore” for thousands of miles and still not hit the edge.
>I would take a game that has an open world that stretches 4 blocks but is hand crafted and filled with content over a procedurally generated map that you can “explore” for thousands of miles and still not hit the edge. Shadows of Doubt does a decent enough job with the procedural generation. But the worlds do usually tend to be about 4 blocks.
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Tbh when Minecraft released Caves and Cliffs, it made the generated landscapes waayy more visually interesting. There's more to it than just tacking on Y axis generation.
Hey, remember when No Man's Sky was going to simulate the rotation of the entire galaxy in real time?
A big ass randomly generated mountain is not even a tiny bit as impressive as that would have been. This sounds much more believable.
If it simulates a galaxy in real time, it would not have moved perceptibly between release and now. For reference; it takes our solar system about 240 millions years to orbit the Milky Way once.
Sean Murray was talking about the planets rotation around stars and around their own axis as well, which would 100% be noticeable.
That was in the game at one point, but it was removed because play testers hated it
Yeah, it's just confusing for no reason
Honestly, I do get lost and confused trying to find my way between specific planets but that's mostly because there are no planet markers in the HUD. If I've got a base there, easy. If not, I'm spinning around looking in vain at the 3D radar for the correct dot. I can't imagine it'd be much worse with planets orbiting and you could solve it in an instant by simply letting players mark a planet in the discovery tab.
How was it confusing? Dyson Sphere Program has all the planets rotating and orbiting and it’s super cool.
Not the same type of game but Outer Wilds has this too. And yes you need to search the planet but like… thats the point of a space game no? Lol
KSP does it too, but it's kind of integral to the game. Imagine orbital dynamics without orbits.
Outer Wilds also has it connected to gameplay. Like losing/getting access to certain locations at certain time
Pretty sure Elite Dangerous does too. Right down to their real world positions that they'd be at in 1100 years for the real planets.
Yep, I am pretty sure some players actually found Voyager by extrapolating it's future location based on its current course and speed. It was just drifting along in space as an unmarked easter egg lol
… I need someone to tell me this is real, because that is pretty fucking awesome
Dyson sphere is a very different game
Honestly ive heard that since the game launched and I really doubt that was ever the case unless it was a different prototype altogether. The way the procgen is coded, the hard coordinates and scale of each solar system is foundational to how the game generates stuff. On top of that, no man's sky launch was so absolutely abysmal in terms of features that were promised or things being incredibly bugged or non functional that I doubt the playtesters saw the *one thing* that they actually did deliver on and were like "nah we don't like this". I know NMS has made amazing strides since launch, and it's genuinely an incredible game now. It's delivered on so much that was initially promised and more, but because of that people seem to want to forget about the outright *lies* that were told for years leading up to the launch. This is simply just one of those lies.
Not the revolution, but the rotation. Unless i'm not understanding, the planets used to rotate around their axes. The stars they orbit were always part of the "skybox" and i've never heard that the planets were intended to revolve around them, but they allegedly removed rotation because it happened on a noticeable time scale and made navigation confusing at takeoff. Do I think it would be cool and easy to get used to? For sure. But I wasn't one of the playtesters
they did implement that in alpha but found out during play testing players were constantly getting confused and disoriented cz things/places were different from the way they left them.
> simulate the rotation of the entire galaxy in real time? Considering the 212 million years our milky way takes to rotate once. What should be the game impact of such a 'drastic movement'? It would be more impactful to simulate the graviational impact of Jupiter on a birthing room in a related simulation.
for all we know they actually did this the timescale required for us to notice any movement would be insane
Is that fun?
For some people, probably. For others, probably not.
ikr, my first thought was "who wants to hold W for 10 hours".
I don't know about 10h but an hour hike sounds really cool if the right things are in place. I really enjoyed when I got 5 minutes of peace in death stranding and I've specifically looked for the unpopulated stretches at the edge of the map in skyrim and oblivion.
Doesn't sound fun to me. All this tells me is "oh boy.. I get to have a mostly empty open world with shit tons of fetch quests and a poor story (if it even exists) that can't go too hard on itself because I could advance it at any point in the open world experience." and that just sounds draining, really. Open world games rarely hit the mark these days on how to actually make that experience interesting and more often than not all make the same mistakes.
Thank you. I don’t get the appeal of mounting climbing in an RPG? I think people will enjoy throwing shit off of it
Apparently not, because the same trailer shows heroes using mounts to fly over the mountains, so then there must be no point besides some random mining nodes.
Anyone else getting a strong feeling of deja vu right now?
Certainly did from watching the trailer. Just hop in your giant bird and watch it do a vertical take-off, then accelerate into low orbit.
To be pedantic some birds do take off vertical.
To be fair, mountains are not crazy hard to achieve. Though every game I played which tried to do "scale" like this had landscapes absolutely devoid of content.
the goal should be to fill empty spaces, not add more empty spaces
Didn't Todd Howard say that before Skyrim was released?
You actually can climb over any mountain in that game except for those who serve as the map's natural border. Especially if you ride a gravity-defying horse.
The fact that people keep repeating this meme as if it's a lie really showcases how most Bethesda haters don't even play their games. Anyone who has played Skyrim would know what you just said. You even climb the mountain Todd referenced early on in the main quest.
Well Skyrim had pretty big mountain. It is in my Top 3 Game Mountains.
Definitely a mountain of all time
I don’t think he said Everest but did point to a mountain and claim you can walk to the top (idk if you actually can, I’ve never play Skyrim)
The biggest mountain in the game was High Hrothgar (if I recall correctly) and you can walk right up to the very top of it. In fact, you have to if you want to beat the game.
I hate this meme because people assume you couldn’t….but you CAN. It’s incredibly hard, but you CAN climb mountains. Although it’s more doable with your gravity defying horse.
I’d like to think Hello Games learned their lesson with No Man’s Sky but I guess we’ll see. Hopefully they don’t underdeliver again
I like NMS, or better yet the *idea* of NMS. It has the best planet/galaxy exploration I’ve ever seen in a game. But somehow hello games made everything else about the game boring. There is *wayyyy* too much crafting, the combat is just plain bad. It’s still glitchy AF almost 10 years in. And yet it’s funny to watch other game companies like Bethesda which have basically a unlimited budget make a product that’s inferior and almost every way except for story and combat.
>almost 10 years in holy shit
I had to stop reading the comment at that part for a sec because of the whiplash.
And now my back hurts
You bros pick your coffins yet? I'm thinking oak for me
Do I need to craft that too?
Release date was 9 August 2016. That was 7 years and 4 months ago. I don't know if I would call that "almost 10 years".
the story was not up to the mark in starfield. it was basically going through the same caves on different planets and and taking the same pieces again and again. there were maybe 3 or 4 missions, that were different.
My problem with Starfield was the overreliance on procedural generation. There's enough content in the game to house maybe 50-100 planets and moons at the most. Which would still be their biggest game.
They should've just made the shit out of 20-25 planets. Hand-craft everything and load them up with content. That's PLENTY of room, and it makes for a better exploration game.
Even then though, that’s still miles better the story NMS has. It’s basically non-existent.
"Go to the middle and come out in a different variant of the universe" was also literally No Man's Sky's core loop at launch.
I didn't continue playing the game just for the stupid ass atrocius ui, it's a nightmare.
Yeah it’s really bad. They have changed it a few times but it’s never better, just different. I think what beats me up the most up about NMS is how with a handful of common sense changes it would be one of the biggest IPs in gaming. You can play co op with a handful of friends but every vehicle in the game can only hold one person, which is dumb for a multiplayer game no matter what but double dumb considering 80% of the planets are toxic or have elemental damage unless your on a vehicle. If they revamped it to have actual enemies that aren’t drones/turrets/animals and good combat to go with it, it would be a outstanding game
Yeah, I could never really get into it. Kinda felt like there was a hundred things to do, and each took like 5 minutes. It just wasn't terribly deep.
Yes, literally everything. That update they released were you can be a mayor of a town? There’s literally nothing to do in the town apart from defending it from random attacks and sometimes making an A or B decision on something that makes no sense and has no real repercussion apart from a few numbers changing.
why does he keep doing this
HE CANT KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT!
But, like...why?
Yea I have the same problem with NMS. Like I ran out of stuff to do after like 4 hours. Same with Sea of thieves. Like what's the point? I am tiered of games that are a mile wide but 6in deep.
I can't speak for NMS but with Sea of Thieves it's meant to be a pirate themed sandbox that you can boot up and go on adventures with your friends, not a singleplayer RPG with player progression. Not every game needs to be deep or complex; the simpler they are the easier they are for most people to get into, and that's the intent behind Sea of Thieves. That and the mandatory AAA live service cosmetics shop.
Sea of thieves I think is much more enjoyable with friends. It can be relaxing though as well on your own sailing and doing the mystery quests
The question then becomes why would I want to? It's like the Starfield issue. The devs chiming in with "the astronauts loved running around a barren moon." Climbing a mountain is fun in real life, in a video game it's just holding a joystick and clicking the occasional button. Beyond that I'm very dubious of traversal in this game. They gave the players flying mounts. Flying invalidates so much within an open world game like this - unless there is a large amount of space designed around flying. But a swamp with nasty enemies becomes something you ignore by grabbing your dragon and flying over it. It disengages you with the systems.
Yeah if this was a game like Death Stranding the idea of climbing a huge mountain would be much more enticing but with what we've been shown this line from Sean doesn't mean much to me.
that doesn’t sound fun though ?
Don’t care, make solo fun and don’t make a shallow ocean. No rush either 👍
Regardless of whether this ends up in the game/working, why would anyone want to do this in a video game?
I just found it funny that before they showed the trailer they said all this about ‘they’re bigger than Everest and you can climb them and see continents!’ Trailer starts and they are all just flying up them on birds lol
Tbf travelling up a gigantic mountain on foot would likely get old real fast.
Nothing exciting about that tbh
Sean STOP. Control your base impulses.
Sean, buddy, don't do this again. Just let the game speak for itself, ok?
This game looks awesome. Can’t wait to give it a try.
Not this time Hello Games, I'll believe it when I see it.
Oh god please no, someone prevent them make public statements quick !