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I very much appreciate the analytical depth of the article. I played Starfield for a total of six hours last weekend on my Xbox series X. It is reasonably good,

I very much appreciate the analytical depth of the article. I played Starfield for a total of six hours last weekend on my Xbox series X. It is reasonably good, at least so far. I'm from the very old school of gamers who were mesmerised by things like Kings Quest I and choplifter. I'm quite sure I understood the very last paragraph, that the NVidia card does a slightly faster job at rendering the frames. I'll consider picking up one of those 4090 cards when it is clever enough to show me a city map in Starfield and draws less power than the flood lighting in a football stadium - and costs less than a year's food bills.

FPGAhacker 3y ago
Dude, choplifter! Haven't thought about that game for a long time.
dclowd9901 3y ago
Why on god’s green earth does the game not have city maps? It’s like they never actually play tested in a city
- karim79 3y ago
  I wrote this reply several times and scrapped all of my drafts. In an inspired moment I came up with this ridiculous conclusion/theory. That Bethesda intend to release city maps as paid DLC - and in the mean time not having those maps helps to increase the number of Steam and XBox game pass "hours played" stats. Or maybe they just forgot, I mean, that can happen.
  - xyzzy123 3y ago
    I wonder if no maps makes things "feel bigger" (in the same way that streaming services seem unwilling to just give you a list of what they have).
    - karim79 3y ago
      That could be it (or part of) the thought process behind the decision, assuming it was in fact a deliberate move. If I'm to have a bash at listing the possible reasons as to why there aren't city maps in Starfield, and in no particular order, here goes: - Scope creep: The desired implementation was so ambitious that they couldn't complete it on time, and didn't want to release something that didn't fulfil the ultimate goal (e.g. a rotatable 3D map, like the ones in the Doom games from when Bethesda took over id software). Maybe they wanted to also track NPCs and add a whole layer of trackability depending on some skill or ability. Maybe they want to help you track resources which are needed for the various crafting mechanisms which appear on the map once you've encountered them (and before you explicitly track a particular recipe or research goal). - Unfinished locations: The possibility that they intend to make topological changes to one or more of the cities in the future, or that the cities are not yet done. The cities are hand-crafted, the rest is "tiled" using handcrafted elements and procedural generation. - Resources and priorities: They descoped it altogether to prioritise polishing the rest of the game as much as possible and anticipated that they will get complaints, and respond to said complaints by promising that it is something they will add at some point in the future because "we love hearing from you and need this feedback to help improve the game" etc. I honestly don't think they forgot about it or that they had/have no intention of implementing it. I think they simply did not have enough time to get it the way they needed it to be on time for release. There might be some unfinished dream city maps implementation tucked away in the current release which just needs to be switched on once it is ready. It could be that they have "something" going on in there but they're not sure about whether or not it will sit well with their future ambitions for the game. My bet is that they didn't have enough time to complete their maps implementation for the release and that there exists some indecision as to what they would consider to be an acceptable implementation. Perhaps they didn't want to present blueprint-style raster diagrams in a future where humanity has galactic reach, space-folding tech and have invested all their resources and research capabilities on creating all the things we need for the year 2330. Just no binoculars, rovers, Google Maps and interplanetary video conferencing and email.
      - WorldMaker 3y ago
        > Perhaps they didn't want to present blueprint-style raster diagrams in a future where humanity has galactic reach, space-folding tech and have invested all their resources and research capabilities on creating all the things we need for the year 2330. Just no binoculars, rovers, Google Maps and interplanetary video conferencing and email. Nothing but landline phones and voice recorders. The landline phones are huge panel things that look like something from the 1970s (and/or Star Wars). I think the lack of maps is heavily dependent on that weird tech baseline they were trying to hit. They seemed to have wanted "60s/70s tech plus FTL" and the Constellation 70s ideal of a smart watch (a space "diver's watch") to be nearly as "diegetic" for game UI as the Fallout "pipboy" as the grand central UI for everything. But then they waffled and included a ton of menus and couldn't decide how much to outright own that they seemed to have wanted a retro-future vision rather than true futurism. (But also possibly disagreed on that internally and never quite decided what they were trying to do with the tech level. It feels inconsistent from outside.) It's very hard for me not to compare here to Outer Worlds with a similar team making similar technology decisions but actually owning them and following them to more absurd lengths. I feel like Outer Worlds had a lot more fun with its technology decisions because it knew it wanted to truly own "Fallout but Space Travel". Starfield has so many moments where it acts like it wants to be "Fallout but Space Travel" but then pulls some punches and just absolutely waffles. Maybe some of it is because they also wanted to add Cyberpunk elements from a decade or three later (the Ryujin storyline, for instance) and sticking to just one retro-future alone wasn't interesting enough for (some of) the team. Had Starfield truly owned 60s/70s retro future maybe there would have been Alien/Aliens-style maps with all those cool, swooping simple green vectors (more Tron-like perhaps than the "pipboy" 40s/50s CRT maps). There's a lot to mine in real world NASA moon maps from the 60s, but those were all paper and many hand-drawn elements. (Relatedly, Outer Worlds gave us fun "paper" tourist maps as a part of their retro playfulness.) I think in waffling about whether or not Starfield was retro-future they couldn't figure out how maps would even look, because they couldn't decide on (or perhaps agree on?) the appropriate tech level in the first place, and gave up for "story reasons" that they couldn't fit in maps.
  - tomnipotent 3y ago
    I don't recall Fallout or Skyrim having in-game city maps, so it's par for the course with Bethesda.
    - berkle4455 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - henriquez 3y ago
      Fallout had local maps everywhere you go and they were quite detailed.
      - tomnipotent 3y ago
        I just pulled up a save game and you're absolutely right. I replayed the game last year and for some reason this feature just didn't come to mind.
  - EagnaIonat 3y ago
    > That Bethesda intend to release city maps as paid DLC They have said they will release them free, just hadn't gotten them completed.
    - TheHappyOddish 3y ago
      That's not what I've seen, it appears they've said they'd "love to do them", with to mention of price: https://twitter.com/BethesdaStudios/status/1701977071465988391 https://twitter.com/BethesdaStudios/status/17019770714659883...
- aaomidi 3y ago
  Because people buy AAA games with no second thought. This game is objectively an underbaked game, but it’s by Bethesda so it’s going to make its RoI with no real effort.
  - dclowd9901 3y ago
    I definitely did, but I feel a bit duped. I think they sort of let us imagine what the game could be and didn’t correct us when we were way off base. Underbaked is a good way of describing it. Old fashioned or arcane are also good ways of describing it. It has an almost gleeful disregard of modern “quality of life” approaches to game design insofar as it almost feels punitive. It’s like they filtered out the best parts out of other bethesda games (open exploration, random encounters and events), and amped up the worst parts (disjointed areas, loading screens). Most missions, too, are just mindless professions of “fetch this thing/talk to or kill this person”. Having just played Tears of the Kingdom and its breathtaking level of open-endedness, this game felt like playing with a playskool toy after playing with a giant set of legos. I just booted up cyberpunk 2077 today because the update is coming soon and I hadn’t touched it in a while so I wanted to see what was what. That game is already like 2 years old and it still feels 10 years ahead of Starfield.
    - aaomidi 3y ago
      Yeah I ended up getting it for free with my GPU and I was fascinated by how…behind it is from even some indie games? Like, Dave the Diver has more exploration than Starfield and they’re not even comparable.
- raytopia 3y ago
  I'm going to guess that it was an attempt to address some fans critism that their newer games were too "hand holding" compared to their older titles. Not saying it was a good design decision but that may have been the thought process.
- deelowe 3y ago
  There are so many questions with this game. I think something happened during development. It's bizarre. I played for hours and kept wondering what's missing and then it hit me, there's no radiant AI in the game. What the hell? Bethesda's engine is known for 2 things 1) object permanence and 2) radiant AI. How in the world did such a core part of creation engine get cut from starfield? That's just insane.
tstrimple 3y ago
> Kings Quest I Heretic. Everyone knows that Kings Quest III is the metric by which all other games are measured! I'll forgive you this time though because to heir is human.
- karim79 3y ago
  I played all of them. KQ1 was my first experience with a PC. I miss those days, I do. Absence makes the heart...
  - tstrimple 3y ago
    I got into computer gaming late. I got a Tandy 1000 in 1995 (when I was 12) which launched my love for computer games and KQ3 was one of my first adventures. Being voracious reader of fantasy novels at the time, being able to play as a poor abused apprentice to a wizard was something I'd never experienced before. Collecting spell ingredients and searching for an escape was so much more engaging than the Sonic and Mario games I'd played before. That and Starflight will always hold a special place in my heart because they allowed me to explore games in a way that I didn't realize existed based on my experience at the time with NES and Genesis games. There was just so much more depth relative to most console games I'd experienced by that point.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      Starflight is probably still ahead of its time. It does such an amazing job of capturing that feeling of being an explorer in a strange universe trying to unravel a mystery against a perceived time limit - though there is none, even if you take forever and Arth gets hit by the anomaly, the game happily continues on. The first time you discover the 'special planet' (avoiding spoilers for a 30 year old game lol) after slowly piecing together those clues, and then eventually understanding what it all means. That sort of curve ball, but one that makes absolutely perfect sense for everything you've learned to date, to say nothing of the extreme moral ambiguity in what you eventually do (and have been doing) - it gave a feeling like nothing I've ever experienced again in 30 years of gaming. If anybody hasn't played Starflight, I couldn't recommend it more. IMO, the version on the Sega Genesis is the best - and easily obtainable with an emulator.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Hamuko 3y ago
>I'll consider picking up one of those 4090 cards when it [...] draws less power than the flood lighting in a football stadium The RTX 4090 is actually very efficient. The only card more efficient than it is the RTX 4080. Every single AMD card is less efficient than it is. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/sapphire-radeon-rx-7700-xt-pulse/39.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/sapphire-radeon-rx-7700-x...

FPGAhacker 3y ago

Dude, choplifter! Haven't thought about that game for a long time.

dclowd9901 3y ago

Why on god’s green earth does the game not have city maps? It’s like they never actually play tested in a city

karim79 3y ago
I wrote this reply several times and scrapped all of my drafts. In an inspired moment I came up with this ridiculous conclusion/theory. That Bethesda intend to release city maps as paid DLC - and in the mean time not having those maps helps to increase the number of Steam and XBox game pass "hours played" stats. Or maybe they just forgot, I mean, that can happen.
- xyzzy123 3y ago
  I wonder if no maps makes things "feel bigger" (in the same way that streaming services seem unwilling to just give you a list of what they have).
  - karim79 3y ago
    That could be it (or part of) the thought process behind the decision, assuming it was in fact a deliberate move. If I'm to have a bash at listing the possible reasons as to why there aren't city maps in Starfield, and in no particular order, here goes: - Scope creep: The desired implementation was so ambitious that they couldn't complete it on time, and didn't want to release something that didn't fulfil the ultimate goal (e.g. a rotatable 3D map, like the ones in the Doom games from when Bethesda took over id software). Maybe they wanted to also track NPCs and add a whole layer of trackability depending on some skill or ability. Maybe they want to help you track resources which are needed for the various crafting mechanisms which appear on the map once you've encountered them (and before you explicitly track a particular recipe or research goal). - Unfinished locations: The possibility that they intend to make topological changes to one or more of the cities in the future, or that the cities are not yet done. The cities are hand-crafted, the rest is "tiled" using handcrafted elements and procedural generation. - Resources and priorities: They descoped it altogether to prioritise polishing the rest of the game as much as possible and anticipated that they will get complaints, and respond to said complaints by promising that it is something they will add at some point in the future because "we love hearing from you and need this feedback to help improve the game" etc. I honestly don't think they forgot about it or that they had/have no intention of implementing it. I think they simply did not have enough time to get it the way they needed it to be on time for release. There might be some unfinished dream city maps implementation tucked away in the current release which just needs to be switched on once it is ready. It could be that they have "something" going on in there but they're not sure about whether or not it will sit well with their future ambitions for the game. My bet is that they didn't have enough time to complete their maps implementation for the release and that there exists some indecision as to what they would consider to be an acceptable implementation. Perhaps they didn't want to present blueprint-style raster diagrams in a future where humanity has galactic reach, space-folding tech and have invested all their resources and research capabilities on creating all the things we need for the year 2330. Just no binoculars, rovers, Google Maps and interplanetary video conferencing and email.
    - WorldMaker 3y ago
      > Perhaps they didn't want to present blueprint-style raster diagrams in a future where humanity has galactic reach, space-folding tech and have invested all their resources and research capabilities on creating all the things we need for the year 2330. Just no binoculars, rovers, Google Maps and interplanetary video conferencing and email. Nothing but landline phones and voice recorders. The landline phones are huge panel things that look like something from the 1970s (and/or Star Wars). I think the lack of maps is heavily dependent on that weird tech baseline they were trying to hit. They seemed to have wanted "60s/70s tech plus FTL" and the Constellation 70s ideal of a smart watch (a space "diver's watch") to be nearly as "diegetic" for game UI as the Fallout "pipboy" as the grand central UI for everything. But then they waffled and included a ton of menus and couldn't decide how much to outright own that they seemed to have wanted a retro-future vision rather than true futurism. (But also possibly disagreed on that internally and never quite decided what they were trying to do with the tech level. It feels inconsistent from outside.) It's very hard for me not to compare here to Outer Worlds with a similar team making similar technology decisions but actually owning them and following them to more absurd lengths. I feel like Outer Worlds had a lot more fun with its technology decisions because it knew it wanted to truly own "Fallout but Space Travel". Starfield has so many moments where it acts like it wants to be "Fallout but Space Travel" but then pulls some punches and just absolutely waffles. Maybe some of it is because they also wanted to add Cyberpunk elements from a decade or three later (the Ryujin storyline, for instance) and sticking to just one retro-future alone wasn't interesting enough for (some of) the team. Had Starfield truly owned 60s/70s retro future maybe there would have been Alien/Aliens-style maps with all those cool, swooping simple green vectors (more Tron-like perhaps than the "pipboy" 40s/50s CRT maps). There's a lot to mine in real world NASA moon maps from the 60s, but those were all paper and many hand-drawn elements. (Relatedly, Outer Worlds gave us fun "paper" tourist maps as a part of their retro playfulness.) I think in waffling about whether or not Starfield was retro-future they couldn't figure out how maps would even look, because they couldn't decide on (or perhaps agree on?) the appropriate tech level in the first place, and gave up for "story reasons" that they couldn't fit in maps.
- tomnipotent 3y ago
  I don't recall Fallout or Skyrim having in-game city maps, so it's par for the course with Bethesda.
  - berkle4455 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - henriquez 3y ago
    Fallout had local maps everywhere you go and they were quite detailed.
    - tomnipotent 3y ago
      I just pulled up a save game and you're absolutely right. I replayed the game last year and for some reason this feature just didn't come to mind.
- EagnaIonat 3y ago
  > That Bethesda intend to release city maps as paid DLC They have said they will release them free, just hadn't gotten them completed.
  - TheHappyOddish 3y ago
    That's not what I've seen, it appears they've said they'd "love to do them", with to mention of price: https://twitter.com/BethesdaStudios/status/1701977071465988391 https://twitter.com/BethesdaStudios/status/17019770714659883...
aaomidi 3y ago
Because people buy AAA games with no second thought. This game is objectively an underbaked game, but it’s by Bethesda so it’s going to make its RoI with no real effort.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  I definitely did, but I feel a bit duped. I think they sort of let us imagine what the game could be and didn’t correct us when we were way off base. Underbaked is a good way of describing it. Old fashioned or arcane are also good ways of describing it. It has an almost gleeful disregard of modern “quality of life” approaches to game design insofar as it almost feels punitive. It’s like they filtered out the best parts out of other bethesda games (open exploration, random encounters and events), and amped up the worst parts (disjointed areas, loading screens). Most missions, too, are just mindless professions of “fetch this thing/talk to or kill this person”. Having just played Tears of the Kingdom and its breathtaking level of open-endedness, this game felt like playing with a playskool toy after playing with a giant set of legos. I just booted up cyberpunk 2077 today because the update is coming soon and I hadn’t touched it in a while so I wanted to see what was what. That game is already like 2 years old and it still feels 10 years ahead of Starfield.
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    Yeah I ended up getting it for free with my GPU and I was fascinated by how…behind it is from even some indie games? Like, Dave the Diver has more exploration than Starfield and they’re not even comparable.
raytopia 3y ago
I'm going to guess that it was an attempt to address some fans critism that their newer games were too "hand holding" compared to their older titles. Not saying it was a good design decision but that may have been the thought process.
deelowe 3y ago
There are so many questions with this game. I think something happened during development. It's bizarre. I played for hours and kept wondering what's missing and then it hit me, there's no radiant AI in the game. What the hell? Bethesda's engine is known for 2 things 1) object permanence and 2) radiant AI. How in the world did such a core part of creation engine get cut from starfield? That's just insane.

tstrimple 3y ago

> Kings Quest I Heretic. Everyone knows that Kings Quest III is the metric by which all other games are measured! I'll forgive you this time though because to heir is human.

karim79 3y ago
I played all of them. KQ1 was my first experience with a PC. I miss those days, I do. Absence makes the heart...
- tstrimple 3y ago
  I got into computer gaming late. I got a Tandy 1000 in 1995 (when I was 12) which launched my love for computer games and KQ3 was one of my first adventures. Being voracious reader of fantasy novels at the time, being able to play as a poor abused apprentice to a wizard was something I'd never experienced before. Collecting spell ingredients and searching for an escape was so much more engaging than the Sonic and Mario games I'd played before. That and Starflight will always hold a special place in my heart because they allowed me to explore games in a way that I didn't realize existed based on my experience at the time with NES and Genesis games. There was just so much more depth relative to most console games I'd experienced by that point.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    Starflight is probably still ahead of its time. It does such an amazing job of capturing that feeling of being an explorer in a strange universe trying to unravel a mystery against a perceived time limit - though there is none, even if you take forever and Arth gets hit by the anomaly, the game happily continues on. The first time you discover the 'special planet' (avoiding spoilers for a 30 year old game lol) after slowly piecing together those clues, and then eventually understanding what it all means. That sort of curve ball, but one that makes absolutely perfect sense for everything you've learned to date, to say nothing of the extreme moral ambiguity in what you eventually do (and have been doing) - it gave a feeling like nothing I've ever experienced again in 30 years of gaming. If anybody hasn't played Starflight, I couldn't recommend it more. IMO, the version on the Sega Genesis is the best - and easily obtainable with an emulator.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Hamuko 3y ago

>I'll consider picking up one of those 4090 cards when it [...] draws less power than the flood lighting in a football stadium The RTX 4090 is actually very efficient. The only card more efficient than it is the RTX 4080. Every single AMD card is less efficient than it is. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/sapphire-radeon-rx-7700-xt-pulse/39.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/sapphire-radeon-rx-7700-x...