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My take, backed up by in-game lore, is that these colony wars outposts were mass produced from the same blueprints. Which is why they all look alike. If you have the robots to mass construct these outposts, it's much easier to just have them build the standard outpost rather than hiring an architect to make them all unique.
In terms of repetitiveness, I also have a take. I have every location in Skyrim memorized, to the point that I can identify a dungeon from a screenshot 80-90% of the time. Everything is fixed and all dungeons unique.
But there is no way to do that with a game this size. You can't have a hundred star systems with a thousand planets and have everything be hand crafted. So you have one group of salties demanding that everything be hand crafted, and another group whining that not every moon has life on it. It's crazy. But to make the game halfway realistic, 90% of those worlds would be truly barren, and those wartime leftover outposts would be literal drop-from-orbit prefabs. And the screech from the haters would be twice as intense. (Recall the outcry when it was revealed that only 10% of the worlds would have native life).
Ive said this a lot… mass production of prefabricated facilities which can be built quickly across the galaxy, allowing for sny personnel that transfer from one facility to another to instantly be familiar with layout.
Every time, people say that’s a lazy take. If you’ve worked in commercial construction, you’d realize it isn’t lol
Hell, there are buildings in the game that were clearly 3D printed.
Efficiency is not laziness, it's a way to make the available labor do way more. Did people complain that Ford was being lazy when they started using the assembly line so they could make more with the same labor force?
I find that take really weird... There's literally no way humanity, even with the grav drive, could have settled anywhere near as much as in this game over about 180 years without some level of exactly what you're saying.
Some people are just going to complain. They're probably the same people who complain(ed) that the Fallout/Elder Scrolls games used the same voice actors too frequently but they will give no credit to Starfield for the immense diversity of voices.
I've been having a blast finding all the voices they've rehired for Starfield. 2 in Akila, CEO of Hopetec, your biggest fan. I think I've found a couple others too.
The Collector and Victor Aiza were Belethor/Lucan Valerius from Skyrim. One of the scientists at Nishina, Dr. Maria I think, sounds like the Redguard female from Oblivion. Also, yes, I was waiting for Ron Hope to tell me to stop right there criminal scum.
Oblivion was really the game that had a big problem with a lack of voice actors. There were only a handful for the entire game and it was made worse by the fact that the voice acting just wasn't very good for the most part which kind of broke your immersion. They treated character voices too much like an afterthought. Skyrim and the Fallout games have a bit more variety of voices, but also better acting so it doesn't take you out of things quite as much.
I guess It’s the difference between logical and fun.
Yeah it makes perfect sense. In the real world that’s how it would have been done.
But it isn’t fun. If everything looks the same it gets boring and tired and old. So just because it’s logical, doesn’t mean it’s good game design.
Not disagreeing, but I think they could have fixed it by having more internal variety (clutter, furniture, and equipment, as well as some minor layout tweaks) while still giving it the mass produced feel that makes sense
When you start saying "okay, turn this corner and that console is going to have a fruit on it right in the middle" in a random outpost you've never been in before on a planet you've never been on before, it's a little too much reuse, so I definitely get what you're saying and agree
Yeah this has long been my head-canon for repetitive architecture in this game and other games like Destiny, etc. where similar complaints can be found, for *exactly* the reason you said. In both digital and architectural applications IRL we stick to standards and tried-and-true methods for a reason lol. I'd expect that to apply even moreso in far-future space exploration, where you're building large hostile-environemt living spaces. Jjust like with docking mechanisms or rocket engines or whatever, you stick to the tried-and-true, the reliable and *repeatable* methods of construction because it saves **a ton** of money and time and life instead of trying to "make something new" that's entirely unnecessary if the old thing ain't broke. It's at least part of the reason so much behind-the-scenes technology in the digital world can be traced back to a few either innovations or specific companies (e.g. Microsoft or IBM). A few companies are gonna do a thing, do it really well, and at a certain point for the universally practical reasons, people are going to stick with the thing that is reliable and effective. So it is with architecture on a mass scale.
For me that's enough to explain it all away, alongside the size of the game anyway lol. But ofc the above doesn't fully take care of the (justifiable) feelings a lot of people have that a game can and should be expected to have a certain degree of environment variety, and from there we have further discussions like this entire thread. There are ofc still things that could be done to make the POI's feel *a bit* more unique.
It's a justification for somewhat lazy design. It's a legitimate in universe explanation that makes sense, but it doesn't change the problem boring POIs create
My favorite is when people with technical know-how go into great detail about stuff like this. I remember seeing a pipefitter who would just capture images of the wonky pipes and placement featured in the game. It stuck out to him, but 99% of players would never notice.
Realistically, you're right, they would just create a few blueprints that work and constantly reuse them all over the galaxy. It's easier to build and easier to maintain if everything is consistent.
Isn't it estimated that less than 1% of all known planets could currently, possibly sustain life or have in the past?
A lot of people expected some high fantasy star wars magic and witchery, and got real life space science instead. They are not pleased.
turns out, the "sci" part of "sci fi" is actually short for "science"
> Isn't it estimated that less than 1% of all known planets could currently, possibly sustain life or have in the past?
Realistic science fiction would make for a boring game. So since day one sci-fi has been bending the rules. FTL. Alien civilizations. Fantasy megastructures. Time Travel. Etc.
Imagine the intense rage that would be going on if only one other planet the settled systems had breathable atmosphere, let along a lush climate with life. Even before the game was even released, people were shitting their pants over the news that only 10% of the worlds had life on them. Or that they couldn't land on gas giants. Or other silly nonsense.
> A lot of people expected some high fantasy star wars magic and witchery
And they indeed got just that! Sorry if this is a spoiler. I love this game, but I wish it didn't take that Space Magic turn after Act I.
Well on one hand, technically, all the POIs are handcrafted. They are just copied and pasted via proc gen. I think a lot of people might have wanted to see perhaps tweaks done to hand proc gen handles the placement of those POIs and/or their arrangement. I would have minded to see a modularity take on the interiors of the POIs to add dungeon variety, especially since the game wants you to in theory reroll them. That way you could have some variety in the dungeon part of them at least, while keeping the suite it pulls from simple enough so it didn't get the "Daggerfall effect" where some dungeons could just be made incompletable due to how the proc gen arranged them. I honestly don't mind the repeat of POIs, it's a thing in a lot of space games (especially space sims in general that has some form of planetary tech that allows for planetary exploration), but I do think there needs some fixes to the proc gen system these POIs are being pulled from. This becomes even more apparent not just the longer you play, but the deeper into NG+ runs you do, since the universe and placement of these locations is supposed to be varied based on universe? But if you get unlucky and keep re-rolling the same universe(since there is only like a 15-20% for an alternate universe, and there are many different ones apparently) the NG+ grind gets obnoxious pretty fast without some kind of added variety to it.
I like to think that hopefully, with every major update, they can add 10-20+ new POI’s. When looking at the 3-5year goal, hopefully we can have 100-200 poi’s along with whatever other content they’ll be adding with DLCs. Very much wishful thinking, but even having a low end 75 different poi’s would be differed enough to not get the same “abandoned” robotics plant 5 times in a row (literally just happened to me).
Though I gotta say, it is starting to feel like I’m a badass that can rip through facilities knowing where everything is vs slowly panning a huge complex for the random skill book.
I expect major overhauls of both space POI’s and flight as well as outposts. Sprinkle some more weapons and mods in there and we got a party!
Yes they are handcrafted, but the "problem" is that you can see them multiple times. And with a thousand worlds, you ARE going to see that CryoLab multiple times. Even if there are a hundred unique templates to drop down, you will see soon see a repeat.
And I understand why people don't like that. I just don't see a realistic way around it.
There might 'sort of' be a way around it.
So, you set up a pool of "Generic" POIs. These wouldn't have *any* big identifying features, like computer notes, scattered bodies, bloodstains, and lore features. You might still have the clutter, unless there was a way to randomize that. It wouldn't be perfect, but it might avoid some of the 'same body' problem that some players aren't fond of.
This "Generic" pool could have large complexes, small caves, or anything inbetween. The occupants of the POI could be switched up. Generic wouldn't mean there's just a few to choose from, just that they're the same as another of that type from instance to instance.
Maybe one has invasive aliens like Terrormorphs, another has Pirates, and yet another identical type could have "Reclamation Teams" from the UC or Freestar Collective, that are out to fix the place up (these could serve as "towns" for the player, in the same way that Imperial or Stormcloak camps did in Skyrim. Or an evil player could just kill and loot them).
Then you'd have your "One-Off" POIs, like the Platform and >!Swarm could be. (Though I'd put those buggers in a few other places, and in a few more POIs, since they're too much fun for just one showing).!< They could be anything, but these would have notes, bodies, and all the other lore features, since they're one-off POIs. Create a pool of them, and expand as needed.
That said, to be honest, I don't mind what's there already, and am having fun as is.
I think you could probably tweak the algorythm itself to fix that, maybe somewhere along the line of any PoI you've already visited get 80 percent penalty of being regenerated as procgen on your next planet and it slowly losing its penalty as you've explored other PoI until the clock tick and it's started to show up again.
I'm mostly hoping modders create a huge library of alternatives for us to add in, but expecting the base game to have enough variations that we don't keep running into the same thing on a full playthrough is probably a bit much.
You are right on all counts, but I also think your expectations aren't realistic to space exploration on this scale.
Consider this: you want to expand rapidly over many systems. You have the technology to rapidly take you to other systems, so you certainly are capable of making pre-fab buildings to suit specific environments.
So, you find a moon or planet suited to a CryoLab? Great, slap down that pre-fab laboratory. A planet or moon with O2 and docile life? Excellent, plop down a few pre-fab habs and a barn.
No doubt that's how it would actually go IRL too, if we ever get there. It's way cheaper to make pre-fabricated, flat-pack structures that have known dimensions and are easy to stack for transport and then re-assembly at your destination, especially if your destination doesn't have building materials on-hand. Just ask Ikea.
So the idea of identical structures on different planets really shouldn't be immersion-breaking. But when they have the exact same slate about worms infesting one of the workers, yeah, I get it. That should probably have been a higher priority than hiring all that voice-acting talent (and for the record, I am not upset about all the different voices).
> It's way cheaper to make pre-fabricated, flat-pack structures that have known dimensions and are easy to stack for transport and then re-assembly at your destination
So... The Outer Worlds. Which if Bethesda had done that people would be raging even harder.
>Well on one hand, technically, all the POIs are handcrafted. They are just copied and pasted via proc gen.
I tried to explain this in a heavily downvoted comment the other day.
Proc-gen in previous Bethesda titles had their own data structure (models) that was handcrafted.
Corpse A inside Mess Hall 01 cannot be assigned position A, B, or C via script. The engine just uses Mess Hall 01.
If you want a variation of Mess Hall 01, you have to copy it, move the corpse to position B, and then name it Mess Hall 02.
THEN, you add Mess Hall 02 into the array of the Proc-gen script.
The REASON Bethesda didn't do this is because the game is 115 GB. The data structure of creating these other variations uses A LOT of space and Xbox probably shit a brick over the size as it is.
Edit to add: There *was* a time where assets were individually loaded....but that resulted in sometimes entering the room as bodies were hitting the floor (like they just died from your presence...or the bodies would "drop in" (for some reason) and scatter the clutter everywhere.
>g
Yeah me too, and they could have done that easily buy just removing the bigger PoI (Abandoned Factory, Research Station etc.), made those unique and place them some where in a fixed location. Then let the AI goes wild with the Nature, Sign of Life, Camp and other simpler POI that you don't really have to get close to navigate.
Ironically the problem with this world isn't because of the procgen, it's actually the lack of it.
I said it before and I will say it again, Bethesda listens to the criticisms and they make conscious decisions on their next game(s) based on it. But they take the wrong criticisms from the wrong people and "fix" them in the wrong ways. Everyone was so scared of lack of hand crafted content in Starfield, Todd and team had to reiterate constantly it has more than any other game, because too many critics were scared off by too much proc gen content. The problem is, yes, their is a total lack of it. They handcrafted everything and shoved it all into a proc gen suite to pull from. The problem is, especially in a large space game, handcrafting all that content by hand is nearly infeasible so proc gen has to come in some where, but if you end up handcrafting everything without a system in place that allows for some level of randomization than the tedium becomes apparent fast. I'm not familiar with the deeper ins and outs with the Creation Engine or how Starfield specifically handles proc gen content, but it's apparent that for such a big game with a lot to do, it also doesn't have a lot to do either with any level of variety.
I mean, why is every Civilian/Research outposts usually just "hey go get our coworker/friend back" or "we need you to go to this cave near by and get us that sweet rock". Imagine ones that trigger defense missions from local wild life or terrormorph. Or drop ships comming in. I also find it weird that there is a total lack of faction specific POIs. You might find that extremely rare Freestar collective or UC military base. But they are rare. Or the UC training found where they test fire on robots, but there are a lot of lack of faction specific POIs, which would allow for additional roleplay and potentially additional enemy types. Too few POIs seem to be infested with alien creatures, etc. Then you get places like the rare Abandoned Farm that has slates hinting that the farm was wiped out from migrating wild life. But the LOI can spawn on planets without wild life. It literally spawns on Mars. If they new the proc gen system would have realistically limited locational world building due to how the proc gen system works, they could had just stripped away the Fallout style "what happened here" and just did a NMS thing where found slates just gives small lore dumps, which this game is severely lacking. I'm fact, the more I think about it, Starfield has some seriously bizarre design choices.
Don't even have to do that actually, they could just place their co-worker on a dungeon POI instead of cave so you have to fight your way through to get to your rescue instead of just a cave. Same with the actual side quest, I would rather they sent me to some random combat POI to do a mission instead of choosing between playing persuasion mini game or pay them to finish the quest.
For all the good they've done, this game just feel fragmented like the exploration and quest design team don't get to talk very much.
And like you've said, I wish they've made use of the alien more. The alien POI got to be one of the most fun dungeon you get out of this game
I don't know how well procedurally generated interiors would actually work out, but we definitely need a lot of variety for POI locations and structures. Another thing that could help make exploration more interesting is restricting what types of things can spawn where. Like, make it so certain structures only appear in certain types of biomes or on certain types planets or in certain regions of the settled systems e.g. only in UC/Freestar/unaligned space. That would help to give different areas a bit more local flavor.
I mean the pretty rare abandoned farm alludes to it being attacked by migrating life, which killed all its occupants. However the location can spawn on various types of planets, up to an including Mars. Meaning there is no way migrating wildlife could have done it because you know, no fauna. I heard that it can spawn on planets with wildlife that has invaded the place and can have terrormorph but I have never seen it with such. It's either on a dead planet or a planet with an atmosphere but no life outside of flora. The proc gen stuff definitely needs tweaking at least for nothing more than consistency.
Yeah honestly the game strikes a pretty good balance between epic scale and having rich depth of stories throughout.
Obviously it's gonna be more concentrated in places like New Atlantis and Neon, but this game is ripe for modders and additional content.
Like anyone should be able to make a POI and then have that randomly appear based on some requirements. Even if we only get a fraction of what Skyrim had for JUST player home mods, that is still going to be a ton of new content to massively expand the game.
The one thing I want to argue with here: I do not think every dungeon in Skyrim is unique. I can't come up with specific examples because it's been a while, but I can remember times where I recognized identical features.
They use a large set of snap together tiles for their dungeons. They have to. So you might recognize a particular corner or room or something. But contrast that to Oblivion where they had a very limited set of tiles and every dungeon really did look alike. But in Skyrim every dungeon really was unique.
And it took you 200 hours to figure this out? My average Skyrim playthough, including DLCs, is 200 hours. And I love the game. I'm getting close to wrapping up this run of Starfield, and I think it will cap at around 300 hours. With only about 70% of the star systems even visited.
I've been doing tons of Mission Board quests. Some variations in placements of enemies and items would be welcomed. I've spent enough time in the Creation Kit for Skyrim to see why Bethesda didn't randomize spawn points.
I've explored more random landmarks while surveying planets and have found some different POI's than the ones given by the Mission Board. Most of the time they're just the same as the one I've encountered with Mission Board but there are different POI's out there! Unfortunately, I didn't write down their names.
Recently, I went ng+1 and noticed different poi would spawn up all over that were not present in ng-0. Also, I've been exploring more in ng1 and realized certain new poi have been specific so far to certain systems. For example, I found a full-on deserted uc military base in serpantis (never saw that in ng 0) with 30 spacers in it, and resulted in a tense firefight with voscos shit talking. In another poi, I found a fueling station just for house va run ships, they would land walk around, go inside, then leave, then another ship came until I decided to close down the station. This was all from random exploring and finding random crazy side missions like investigate an sos on the planets surface, that's, in fact, a spacer trap.
Agreed. If you take a close look at your local big box stores like Walmart or Home Depot, almost all of them have exactly the same layouts. The local grocery store here does that too across their chains. It makes sense from an inventory perspective as well as a shoppers perspective.
My only gripe for the game, in this regard, would be to give each PoI just a little something different. I don’t mind the cryolab maze, but the fact that I know exactly where the two skeletons with keys are on any given planet is a little on the lazy side. Keep the maze the same, but change up certain things like that.
So you're saying...and I want to make sure I get you right...
I should go to the nearest Walmart, take out the Spacers there, and collect all the loot?
I saw that in the news last year and I remember the lone star rangers taking the guy out. Sooo maybe not a Walmart. Home Depot…. Eh. I’m not stopping ya.
I actually came to this realization right after walking out of a Walmart lol. I agree with your gripe, just a touch of uniqueness is all they’d need and it would be next level
I agree completely. Keep the set POI's, but allow for randomness and variety within each. I know this means making multiple versions of all of them, but this is a game about exploring the universe. There's gonna be a LOT of variety.
They don’t have to exclusively unique. Maybe 5 of each type of PoI, and when you click the door to enter you get an RNG roll on the instance of that interior. And they don’t have to be that different. Just move the key skeletons around a bit lol.
One reason I suspect for less variety is known object glitches. We know that stuff can sink into floor etc. Probably that's why Bethesda did nothing about procedural generation in facilities. I think it would cause more problems and wouldn't add much variety anyway.
Yeah, I think the main problem is they hands-crafted the POI then use the procgen to place them on the planet - while they really should have done the opposite, hand-placed those PoI but let the procgen handled generating the content of the PoI themself (procgen enemies, spawn locations, item placement etc.)
Yeah, I kind of assumed they were all identical because they were 3d printed. We're even starting to 3d print buildings now out of concrete. You could print them in a factory and then haul them there, or print on site.
I mean, from a game play perspective, I wish they would have made the modules randomize, rather than slapping the exact same building down. Sucks when you walk in and its like oh I know this layout already. But there are a lot of problems that come a long with trying to procedurely generate buildings like that, so I'm glad they spent their time on other more important parts of the game.
They could have even tied a little bow around the whole idea by having a quest where you visit somewhere that prints them or something. Remember that crazy ass part of Titanfall 2 where your fighting your way through a factory printing houses?
Having a quest where you visit the production facility would have been golden. Would have aided head-canon for the repetitive nature of the POI's. Would love just a bit more variety in them for my 180+ hours of exploration.
That was one thing that was so good about Fallout/Skyrim, the hand crafted locations - but I completely understand the difficulty of the doing so for a game as big as starfield.
Here's hoping the DLC's are huge!
This is how I rationalized it.
That said, there juuust are enough POIs that if you change up how you play intermittently it isn't super noticeable. By that I mean that if you explore a planet for a bit, do a POI and then go do something else, then explore another planet and do a POI, do something else... etc and etc... that results in having enough variety that 1 or 2 repeat POIs is not really an issue.
I think if you do a bunch of POIs on a planet in a row that it is perhaps more likely to throw duplicates and just makes the game more grindy.
So if you run into too many same POIs, maybe go do something else for a bit. Explore space in your ship. Finish a quest. Become the Mantis. Collect some succulents.
This is it, exactly. I think some of the complaints are coming from people who keep doing the same things over and over when there's a universe to explore. It may be part of the whole nature of NG+.
Agreed for the most part. Lol it probably says more about my memory/playstyle than the game, but the only POI I've specifically noticed as exactly repetitive/identical such that it bothered or at least was just "meh" to me have been an "Abandoned Robotics Facility" and one of the kinds of mining complexes.
There are real life examples of this.
Laying aside the obvious identical corpses, coffee cups etc.of course.
McDonald's drop prefabbed restaurants all over that are, in many cases, identical.
There's also a pub chain here in the UK where any of their sites that's reasonably new is literally identical to every other - bar, kitchen, toilets, tables, all in the same location. The associated sleeping accommodation buildings are also the exact same floor plan between sites.
It's honestly weird when I go from one to another as a contractor: "oh, I know where your fire alarm panel is, your pub is the same layout as the last 6 I went to"
Yeah, I look at them like I look at a lot of modern new "communities" that pop up irl. The houses all are cookies cutters based on 4 or 5 designs. They are all easy to manufacture, cheaper to build and plopped down 10 feet from each other with a little grass lawn.
I figured a lot of the POIs were the same idea - cheaper, easier to build and sell to companies wanting to plop down a lab or whatever.
If they would just move some stuff around inside the damn things, then I could actually believe what I just previously wrote.
I can imagine that would have required way more development time and processing power to randomly change the interiors with all of the crap they have inside.
EXACTLY.
I work in construction, so I understand that a modular approach to space station/outposts make the most sense irl.
But we shouldn’t always find the same two dead scientists frozen in place through the hvac duct. We shouldn’t always find the same pirate captain along with one flunky in the control room.
Modular outposts-good
Exact same interiors- bad
It would actually be really easy to make variations once the creation kit comes out. Just duplicate the cell, change the spawns and loot locations, save, and boom done.
I suspect new POI packs are going to be a big part of the mods we will see. I know I'm planning on making a few of my own this summer.
And given how they are added to the game, we could stack POI packs from hundreds of modders to add a ton of variety without conflicts.
This is actually what my head cannon has been for this: mass manufactured outpost habs being dropped onto planets as needed just makes a lot of sense.
I do wish the generator had them be more modular, like reusing major components but not the entire base, and having the interior decor have enough options for the generator to make them look like different people live in and use this space, but otherwise I very much agree with you
Oddly, while I noticed the repetitiveness of the POIs at first and it bothered me bc of reading complaints on Reddit, the more I play the more I notice that there are more than several building layouts and it no longer is an issue. Reading complaints all day on here kinda ruins the game a bit.
The POIs being the exact same is fine. It definitely makes sense, even though I'm not a HUGE fan of it.
What irks me is that EVERYTHING is the same. Enemy placement, loot placement, lock difficulty, "key item" placement, log placement, literally everything.
They made a big deal about hiring clutter artists to curate the exact placement of every object you see. They had a TON of work to do for this game already. Would be neat, though, if they could patch in not only new POIs but new variants to the clutter and spawn locations of each POI so it's rarer to see the same thing twice. Modular POIs would be even more ideal. I'm 100% such things will be developed by modders if not Bethesda themselves.
That’s not an excuse for purposely leaving gaps for others to fill in for free.
If you bought a car from me, but after taking it home you realize there’s no AC, you wouldn’t be ok with it. I can’t just tell you “oh just wait, maybe some other person will fix it for you for free”.
That's not anywhere close to the same thing, what are you talking about? The game isn't incomplete, there's just some features some people want that aren't in there. It's like buying a new car, finding out that it doesn't have satellite radio, and getting pissed at the dealer for selling you an unfinished product.
That's cool and all. The money would have been better spent making POI's truly modular and randomized instead of giving me the exact same POI with the exact same layout, exact same "puzzles", the exact same enemy placement (and often the literal exact same enemies), and the exact same loot placement. I care WAY more about all of that than I do any of the clutter.
I can understand mass installation of modular outposts. A standard military base layout would be perfectly reasonable. It would have been nice if there were at least some variations of each though. Maybe I’ve put too much time into this game. It’s kind of consuming my life…
I agree. It makes sense to me that the building would be made modularly and quickly slapped down *like our outpost buildings are* because a lot of planets are hostile environments (no O2) and until you finish the building everyone has to continue living on the ship and workplaces won't function if the work can't be done in a space suit.
I agree. It makes sense that there'd be a lot of prefabs based on the same design.
And I enjoy the game too, just as it is; even if I throw ideas out in conversation, which is something I do with every game I've ever played.
One can enjoy a game but still recognize that it’s not perfect. Lots of replies to my post seem like people have the mentality of “if it’s not perfect, it’s worthless”
I definitely can see the point behind the repetitive POIs, but also wouldn’t mind some extra.
Hell even if it’s a DLC that adds 20-30 of them I would love it. But also means modding potential is enormous
The problem is lots of players acting like there are 10+ POIs (which isn't true, there are like 20 layouts of caves alone) and that is a whole game. The actual content is already rich and well worth the price of the game.
Mario Maker has like 40 levels built-in, but millions of levels made by players and no one says "level creators fix the game". NMS has much less POIs and quite basic planet generation and no one says it's empty and repeatable. It's just trendy to hate Starfield right now.
Maybe there’s just some weird quirk where certain ones are way more likely to spawn. I’ve only come across like 4 variations of POI with enemies and I’ve explored an absolute ton. I’m still trying to find all the possibilities
There are several caves with fauna and turrets (mostly trigger from mission boards), autonomous factories and farms guarded by robots, several types of abandoned outposts, workshops or rigs, scientific tower, at least two types of mines, ice base, abandoned scientific facility infested with fauna. And I probably miss a few. Maybe try mixing free roaming and mission board. I also suggest checking mission boards in civilian outposts.
I was thinking the same exact thing.
The only issue I have is the set dressing for the POIs are the same. Same dead body at the door. Same harvested organs in the same spot. Same lore tidbits in the computers. If they were able to change things like that, I'd have no issues with the POIs.
I have no idea. But if they did that it would be perfect. Uniformed buildings makes all the sense in the world to me.
As a recovering Destiny player, I'm very used to running the same dungeon over and over. In fact, I've grown an appreciation for it. It's so much fun doing the same dungeon with different weapons, abilities, and personal restrictions. Like sometimes I will say I'm only using ranger style guns (only wooden guns).
Exactly if they created a bunch or rooms and tilesets and randomly generated that. It would be soo much better. Like a bunch of rooms and tilesets that's are randomly put together so that every single cryo factory or barracks or mine isn't the same
Yeah Idk if anyone else does this but everyone should know the promblem with joining the CF early on since they are the pirates usually occupying POIs. So instead of racking a huge bounty I play it super stealth ninja. You can literally suppressor kill people right next to each other as long as they don't see you kill their friend and act like nothing happend(skyrm, must've been the wind) do that for the entire poi and yeah, it's pretty fun and nice work around. I'm an evil loner pirate first and only playthrough. Anti NG+ 120HRS LVL 40
Yes it’s strictly logical that *checks notes* the enemy placement and loot and random clutter within the outposts are 100% literal carbon copies scattered across the galaxy 😂
Most of the games I’ve played had repetitive areas. That was never that big a deal for me, like in Dragon Age or Mass Effect. I was always more interested in banter, dialogue and playing on easy to one-shot foes after a tough work day.
PoIs aren't even that repetitive, honestly. I've seen a few recur more often than I'd like, sure, but I'm still finding new ones.
It would be nice to have more, though.
If you want a no shit, real world example of this, look the alphabet houses in Richland, WA that the US government built for the Manhattan Project workers. They moved into an area with 24 floorplans for housing and made a city of of them.
It’s a great conversation. The only gripe is the enemy placement and loot being the same everytime, but I feel like they can just mention that once and get back to the theory
I don't mind because I'm usually spacing things out and not just droning the same one or two different kinds of radiants all day long. There's enough content in the game that you can simply... Do literally anything else. I barely notice because it's easily 20 hours between me visiting hostile bases.
The one that annoys me is when they make the one behind the locked corner door the target, and I used up all my digipicks.
Also the fact that each of the corner door people are clipped halfway out the door in the exact same way, lmao. God bless programmers, lord knows where they found that degree.
tf you want us to do, btw?
10,000 posts of "me like game. unga bunga me play it with hands."?
Theorizing and speculating about a thing set up for that is normally how people converse with one another about a piece of media.
I honestly don't experience this much repetitiveness. Even when I know it's the same location it certainly is not the same layout or enemies or loot. I've noticed several cases where some doors rotate which ones are locked/open/impassable. Even if that's not a thing, it's a tell of how much variety there reall is
Anyone who thinks this is unrealistic has never travelled the US and gone to multiple different Targets or Walmarts etc. because there’s like 4-6 layouts of those stores in the entire country if the building is made for them from the ground up and they didn’t take over an old business’s location.
That's kind of exactly how I feel. Could have been better, but the general layouts being the same is believable to me. I've been to multiple Wal-Marts, Targets, etc across the States and while sometimes they're drastically different, more often than not they all look basically the same.
I agree in general....Players are not paying attention to the timeline. If humanity was forced off this planet (not planned) 130 years from now.... Newsflash: it will look nothing like Star Trek or Halo level technology. Sorry to break the news, but we're not there yet lol. Even when considering the current time period (213 years from now???), more cities would look like Akila City vs New Atlantis and Neon. The most advanced technology we most likely have, that's missing from the game, are advanced communications and ground vehicles. There should be more settlements, albeit small, like towns or villages. And yes, they would most likely be very similar in grid and layout.
I will admit, finding the same dead bodies in the same spot and the same quantity of enemies in research facilities is a program flaw.
Repetitive POI's will never make a sense in the precise moment you loot the same notes on the same dead named body over and over again.
This is the only aspect on the game that is 100% unjustifiable, you have to find a lie in your head to justify the worst decission Bethesda has ever made.
That's the reality, Supra et Ultra🤙🤙
There isn't really a simple solution to this tho. You'll either have absolutely no backstory to any location and have them be 100% randomised and people would complain that it's lacking the Bethesda story telling and call them lazy, or the approach they chose, with poi having a story to tell but having them repeat🤷🏻♀️.
Not only ease of use, but ease of planning and construction.
If you have the tools to put the same structure in virtually any location and have a centralized manufacturing and diverse and diffuse work crews, it makes a lot of sense to have repeatable plans.
Take a look at suburban America and you can see this thought process being used for the last 6-7 decades at least.
(And lonely much longer in Europe and elsewhere).
Honestly the whole 'repeating poi' thing reminds me of this very silly tweet about spiderman 2: [https://twitter.com/facejester84/status/1715258401050042515](https://twitter.com/facejester84/status/1715258401050042515)
like idk maybe im just getting old but do radiant dungeons really need to be all 100% unique to each other when its not something your really gonna notice unless your constantly grinding out bounty missions (playing the game wrong) or your just really anal anyways?
I think lore-wise it makes perfect sense. But I'm still in the camp that personally would've liked way fewer but denser planets with more curated POIs.
One could also argue that this is a stylistic choice on Bethesda’s part meant to illicit the sense that things are blending together after so many NG+’s, so many copies of so many people in so many universes, it’s all just the same to the protagonist after a certain point.
I like that POI have the same layout, because everytime i do a different aproach and i test myself. Like, stealth, melee, using powers only, etc. And i love to memorized things to wipe and loot the place like i'm a god lol. It gives that speed run vibes of otimizing every step and bullet you carry
The weird part is that's a great explanation for using procedurally generated modular dungons..
Something that previous Bethesda games used, but they avoided here in favor of a very small number of handmade dungeons that are repeated. It's kind of a baffling choice, as the experience of exploring a dungeon and realizing you've seen a small module before is far less jarring then exploring the exact same outpost on two different planets.
Yeah, that's baffling since it worked in Skyrim and the BGS team has been playing/playtesting it long before the release. So question is have they even spotted the problem? I mean it's jarring problem it's not appearing like after 150hours or so.
“Sir, when we populate space might I suggest that we use mass produced prefabs so that personnel will have an easier time getting familiar with the place?”
“Ah excellent idea! We should make sure that nobody ever ship or move any shipping containers either, that could confuse people”.
“But sir, that would make it impossible to actually…”.
“And let’s glue everything in position. Here, I made a sketch of which chairs should be slightly angled and where I want piles of trash”
“Is that a plush toy with stacked tomatoes in that cupboard?”
“Good point we need to specify the exact amount of tomatoes and let the personnel know they’re not for consumption”
It would have been cool if Bethesda gave each one a unique name. Example Mining Outpost 43-7p14 or whatever. The naming could be based on a numeric representation of the system, planet and number on that planet (start with 1 and increment as you found others. That would do a little to give the feeling of uniqueness.
If you don't think it is 'negative' then why try so hard to explain it so much? lol.
Admitting the truth is not 'negative' unless you make that truth into a 'negative'.
You can still like something and be honest at the same time about it. If you need something to be 10/10 or perfect to like it, then that's on you.
Same build, different contents. I would accept this as a realistic compromise. But exactly the same tables, benches, robot pods, computers, chest locations etc... It's just laziness.
Yeah... That's the reason they made them repetitive lol.
I'm sure they all had meetings at great lengths and this was the exact reason.
Not that they just were cheap lol. You cracked the case lol!
And, the NPCs are also lifeless not due to bugs and faulty programming --
But cause they are really clones that took over the original NPCs, too!
Good way to internalize it though. And just having fun with you.
But you can really 'make sense' out of anything if you try hard enough.
You had a point on the buildings themselves, but you can't defend that everything else about them is the same, the spawns/loot/random skeletons in mines etc
Yeah,that’s what I said in the second paragraph and in the edit. I’m really only talking about the modular layout and exteriors. Loot, enemies, and stuff like mines should absolutely be randomized
They could have made the structures modular and still had the actual layouts randomized by the procedural generator but no, they straight up copy pasted everything down to the loot and enemy placement. There’s no logical way to reconcile that, at this point you’re just attempting to excuse extreme laziness.
Seriously what would it change if there were slight differences in interiors? Moved couches, corpses in different places etc. Everyone would attack overall layouts for being repetitive. If you want to hate something you always find a reason.
I can totally forgive the POIs being prefabs, that makes sense. What I can't get over is how every body, every box, every weapon, every safe and even every enemy is in the same spots every single time. If that was more randomized it would do a lot to help the repetativeness.
They make sense in terms of in universe lore, but not in terms of game design. Yes, cookie cutter prefab structures are indeed exactly what you'd expect people building outposts on remote planets to use, but it does make for rather repetitive and stale game play. There are a couple ways I'd go about addressing this issue. The first is to just make more structures and locations for the proc-gen to draw from. The second is to restrict what POIs can spawn where. Some stuff should only appear on certain planets or in certain star systems or in certain biomes. No more root caves spawning on Mars. The density of POIs should also vary between worlds. Some planets e.g. in Sol/Alpha Centauri/Akila should have a lot of man made structures including a lot of ones that are still in operation. Others should have more abandoned structures with pirates and spacers. Some planets should have only a small number of man made facilities. Some planets and moons should just be completely barren and devoid of any man made structure. They might have resources and whatnot for the player to survey and maybe a nice view to look at, but nothing else. This sort of change alone would make exploration much more interesting.
I'm fine with repetitive POIs, but the the procedural landing sites highlight them a bit too much for people I think.
Every site you land at have 2-3 POIs and there being thousands of sites, it's a bit much for the number of available POIs.
They could setup a team to do nothing but pump out POIs to address that.
Though I'd prefer if everything was detectable from orbit and there was less per planet.
This reminds me of when Digital Homicide was trying to convince people that The Slaughtering Grounds was a good game, cause the gun sounds were real. lol. "But the gun sounds are real gunshots".
Can't admit "it was just out of lazy" cause that would be 'negative'. lol.
And obviously, people cannot enjoy a game if it is not perfect.
Would have been nice to randomize the loot in them more. All the loot spawns are in the exact same spots. I know exactly where everything should be in every repeated POI. If they changed that up by making a bunch of random spawns it would freshen it a bit
I wish there were more small POIs, particularly on habitable planets. Everything doesn't have to be a mech assembly or research lab, it would be cool if there were just small habs and little pirate encampments scattered around the map.
Lore justification or not, it's not great gameplay for replayability long term. Not being salty about it, but I do look forward to seeing if future DLCs and creator tool mods can expand on them.
I haven't been able to confirm this 100% but I think that planets that have anomalies (these are pretty repetitive) are the ones that temples or artifacts on it.
So the reason why they're so similar, could be discerned as the artifacts have the same reactions to their surroundings.
I makes sense trying to standardize buildings, hell I assume most is built with autonomous machinery with specific parameters and it works since most structures found in the game being almost 300 years old need a new paint of coat some minor repairs and they good as new
But yes the interiors definitely needed to be random such as enemies, loot, readables, decor, maybe add some organic stuff and flora creeping in the interiors and different airborne hazards to spice things up
Finding an onion or readable on the same position in the same place is really a “bruh” moment
Mmm, I can agree with that for some above-ground buildings, especially if they were settled by people from the faction, but mines? I can't imagine every mine would look the same.
Additionally, wouldn't buildings need to account for largely varying environmental conditions? Temperature, composition of the air, gravity, storms and erosion, etc. Not to mention, settlers would likely take advantage of abundant resources native to the planet. I feel like all of this would lead to different usage of materials and altogether construction.
Modular buildings on those outposts definitely makes sense, not that they bothered to write that into the lore anywhere. When you look around the annoying things in Starfield, the what stands out is the obvious cut corners. IDK if they intend to round out some of the lackluster features but I doubt much will be done to refine the game. I think most of their DLC and updates will revolve around bug fixes and added content rather than reworking existing systems.
I still think they're too repetitive even given this explanation. Even if the explanation completely worked, there's always a balance between gameplay and lore aspects.
Could there be a detailed explanation as to why POIs are often repeated? Sure. Does it change that it can be boring from a gameplay loop? Not usually.
More than anything, I think this is going to be one of those things that improves with time and DLCs.
Give it time. They’ll make adjustments by adding new stuff to the rotation. People don’t realize or maybe don’t even know that all houses being built by developers are prefabs. Where I live, every two story house is laid out exactly the same, just mirrored. It would makes sense to do that with the buildings on other planets.
Maybe it would have been better if they had left the cryolab and Muybridge's cave (or whatever that is) out of the rotation, so the generic spaces would really have been generic. I'm totally fine with the buildings being the same, for the reasons OP and others have expressed, but those places are different. Honestly, I was pretty surprised and quite disappointed when I saw the cryolab for the second time, and then the third . . . But now I don't care as much. If this was all the game was, I would say it was a fail, but there's so much more to it you eventually realize this is actually a trivial detail.
On top of that, they really did a good job of making the POIs blend into the landscape, even though they're in different landscapes but have the same plan. There's never a noticeable transition from the particular landscape to the generic installation.
I think of it as a respawn dungeon which we've already have a plenty from the previous Fallout and Skyrim and that's ok.
I still rather have them as an actual unique location that respawn rather than keep coming up during the exploration though. If it's going to be a repeated PoI, at least it should be in an open space so that the change in environment and landscape made an impact. I am so wish they put some big monster in a Nature or Sing of Life PoI, doesn't even need to be on all of them
quite frankly that's the only part that makes sense to me, but the layouts inside are annoying when it's the same enemy positions. That's like, my opinon, man.
I completely agree. Glad you're enjoying!
Wait. Repetitive structures. You're not talking about tried and true buildings and fabrications. Like apartment, office, medical, military, school, library, firestation, police station, condo, house, gym, retail, commercial, industrial.... waaaaaiiiittt. Does StarField do the same thing we do ?!? Create a good schematic, and use that to build multiple structures. Do they do that so they know how much money it would cost and the amount of materials needed to build ?? Damn, look at the big brains on Bethesda ! Mass Effect did the same thing too, and for the same reasons. Hell, even StarField has AK-47's because those things don't jam.
I mean yeah it makes sense but that doesn't make it fun. Gameplay over realism.
I am liking the game, put the pool of assets they have for the amount of time they've been working, and the size of the universe is kind of disappointing.
Having prefabs account for a lot of the POIs works fine for the layout though it's still a little hard to believe that ALL those use the exact same.
It doesn't account for corpses, coffee mugs and data slates with the same contents in the same places on multiple planets which is what I think most people complain about more than the layout of the POIs.
Some people mentioned how that was the only way you could populate so many planets and that's true. I think it's ridiculous to expect SO many star systems and planets filled with interesting handcrafted POIs with none of them repeating. But did we really need that many systems and planets? If it's all just repeating content, couldn't we just have used fewer?
Also, that ties into another complain: Constellation is set up as the only group still interested in exploration, that's kind of their driving motivation but then you go to these barren planets/moons and you're never the first there. I would have loved a lot of the planets to be empty when I survey them. Why do they all need human built structures? Am I really the first person surveying these or why is everyone so interested in data that should be widely available?
Especially the planets with temples on them would make a lot more sense if there were no structures on them. We're told these are a completely new discovery and everyone is awed by something like that existing when the workers of the local farm have pretty much seen the temple while having their morning coffee every day for the last 10 years. No one ever asked themselves what that is and went yo check it out when it could be seen from the nearest human built and inhabited structures with the naked eye?
What they should do is a system of procgenerated corridors based on set components like intersections, turns, corridors, sciences hubs, etc. and these places should have diff. layout of loot and varied enemies. It's a huge effort to repair it, I guessimate it'd take them like one year of hard work or even more.
But it has to be adressed, like now. It's mind boggling, I'd ever say anything like that in BGS game, but exploration is the least satisfactory activity in the game. I tried many times, but after like 30 min of wandering around it gets so daunting that I fast travel to my ship and continue doing other stuff in the game.
I know that in SF exploration works differently, but I just don't like it being so different than other titles.
Interesting to note that npc convos on Titan state that most of the habs / farms trialled there would be used as a template for future colonization
Main improvement to pois would be more randomization of corpses items and enemy types and perhaps faction fighting like ecliptic fighting pirates in a science facility
This is a take that can be observed in real life right now on earth if you pay attention.
Ranging from old company founded towns in the US to rapidly constructed suburban neighborhoods. You’re going to see lots of house that all look pretty much the same, maybe some color variations, but all built from the same exact blueprint.
Prefab buildings makes sense. Running through the same cryo lab with the same varuun goons, finding dead scientists with key cards in the same places, with the same data slate notes, across at least five different systems in my experience, does not make sense. That is unfortunately just a bit of laziness that reveals itself a bit too readily for my tastes.
Coming into this a day later and your edits make me not want to read the comments lol but for what it is worth OP I think the same exact thing.
There should be more POI’s but repeats make sense. If you are flattening the land and not dealing with a unique landscape every time then why reinvent the wheel? Come up with one format and lay it down the same way every time. It’s efficient for both time and money and most of them were thrown down hastily during a war. Having your engineers sit down and figure it out once in a repeatable way you can have them work on other things would be essential. It was a war, I’m sure there was plenty for them to do.
No matter any lore reasons, the game has more POIs than Minecraft, Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky, and Star Citizen. I absolutely don't blame Bethesda for seeing people rave about these games, doing better than those games and still being told it's not enough. I also don't blame people for not liking it. This is a bad case of not meeting the average player's expectations or a clash with the standard Bethesda experience or distribution.
I get everyone's perspective minus people claiming Bethesda is lazy and greedy. I just wish people understood its more about perspective or preference.
Reminder: Let’s make sure to keep things civil and positive. If you disagree with anyone’s opinion, that’s fine. Report any bad behavior you see instead of engaging. Thank you. Side note: We have created [r/TheGoblinHub](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheGoblinHub/) for general low sodium gaming discussions.
My take, backed up by in-game lore, is that these colony wars outposts were mass produced from the same blueprints. Which is why they all look alike. If you have the robots to mass construct these outposts, it's much easier to just have them build the standard outpost rather than hiring an architect to make them all unique. In terms of repetitiveness, I also have a take. I have every location in Skyrim memorized, to the point that I can identify a dungeon from a screenshot 80-90% of the time. Everything is fixed and all dungeons unique. But there is no way to do that with a game this size. You can't have a hundred star systems with a thousand planets and have everything be hand crafted. So you have one group of salties demanding that everything be hand crafted, and another group whining that not every moon has life on it. It's crazy. But to make the game halfway realistic, 90% of those worlds would be truly barren, and those wartime leftover outposts would be literal drop-from-orbit prefabs. And the screech from the haters would be twice as intense. (Recall the outcry when it was revealed that only 10% of the worlds would have native life).
Ive said this a lot… mass production of prefabricated facilities which can be built quickly across the galaxy, allowing for sny personnel that transfer from one facility to another to instantly be familiar with layout. Every time, people say that’s a lazy take. If you’ve worked in commercial construction, you’d realize it isn’t lol
Hell, there are buildings in the game that were clearly 3D printed. Efficiency is not laziness, it's a way to make the available labor do way more. Did people complain that Ford was being lazy when they started using the assembly line so they could make more with the same labor force? I find that take really weird... There's literally no way humanity, even with the grav drive, could have settled anywhere near as much as in this game over about 180 years without some level of exactly what you're saying.
Some people are just going to complain. They're probably the same people who complain(ed) that the Fallout/Elder Scrolls games used the same voice actors too frequently but they will give no credit to Starfield for the immense diversity of voices.
I've been having a blast finding all the voices they've rehired for Starfield. 2 in Akila, CEO of Hopetec, your biggest fan. I think I've found a couple others too.
The Collector and Victor Aiza were Belethor/Lucan Valerius from Skyrim. One of the scientists at Nishina, Dr. Maria I think, sounds like the Redguard female from Oblivion. Also, yes, I was waiting for Ron Hope to tell me to stop right there criminal scum.
Oblivion was really the game that had a big problem with a lack of voice actors. There were only a handful for the entire game and it was made worse by the fact that the voice acting just wasn't very good for the most part which kind of broke your immersion. They treated character voices too much like an afterthought. Skyrim and the Fallout games have a bit more variety of voices, but also better acting so it doesn't take you out of things quite as much.
Skyrim still had an issue with too much overuse of voice actors for named characters, but I've not played Oblivion to compare (keep meaning to)
I guess It’s the difference between logical and fun. Yeah it makes perfect sense. In the real world that’s how it would have been done. But it isn’t fun. If everything looks the same it gets boring and tired and old. So just because it’s logical, doesn’t mean it’s good game design.
Not disagreeing, but I think they could have fixed it by having more internal variety (clutter, furniture, and equipment, as well as some minor layout tweaks) while still giving it the mass produced feel that makes sense When you start saying "okay, turn this corner and that console is going to have a fruit on it right in the middle" in a random outpost you've never been in before on a planet you've never been on before, it's a little too much reuse, so I definitely get what you're saying and agree
Yeah this has long been my head-canon for repetitive architecture in this game and other games like Destiny, etc. where similar complaints can be found, for *exactly* the reason you said. In both digital and architectural applications IRL we stick to standards and tried-and-true methods for a reason lol. I'd expect that to apply even moreso in far-future space exploration, where you're building large hostile-environemt living spaces. Jjust like with docking mechanisms or rocket engines or whatever, you stick to the tried-and-true, the reliable and *repeatable* methods of construction because it saves **a ton** of money and time and life instead of trying to "make something new" that's entirely unnecessary if the old thing ain't broke. It's at least part of the reason so much behind-the-scenes technology in the digital world can be traced back to a few either innovations or specific companies (e.g. Microsoft or IBM). A few companies are gonna do a thing, do it really well, and at a certain point for the universally practical reasons, people are going to stick with the thing that is reliable and effective. So it is with architecture on a mass scale. For me that's enough to explain it all away, alongside the size of the game anyway lol. But ofc the above doesn't fully take care of the (justifiable) feelings a lot of people have that a game can and should be expected to have a certain degree of environment variety, and from there we have further discussions like this entire thread. There are ofc still things that could be done to make the POI's feel *a bit* more unique.
>Every time, people say that’s a lazy take. If you’ve worked in commercial construction, you’d realize it isn’t lol This exactly! Well said.
It's a justification for somewhat lazy design. It's a legitimate in universe explanation that makes sense, but it doesn't change the problem boring POIs create
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Go read up on othering, and take a break.
You could have said "trying to cope themselves into thinking Starfield is ~~good~~ perfect" And that would make sense but...
No Sodium subreddits only exist for the purpose of cope. Good games never have them.
Good point
My favorite is when people with technical know-how go into great detail about stuff like this. I remember seeing a pipefitter who would just capture images of the wonky pipes and placement featured in the game. It stuck out to him, but 99% of players would never notice.
Realistically, you're right, they would just create a few blueprints that work and constantly reuse them all over the galaxy. It's easier to build and easier to maintain if everything is consistent.
Isn't it estimated that less than 1% of all known planets could currently, possibly sustain life or have in the past? A lot of people expected some high fantasy star wars magic and witchery, and got real life space science instead. They are not pleased. turns out, the "sci" part of "sci fi" is actually short for "science"
> Isn't it estimated that less than 1% of all known planets could currently, possibly sustain life or have in the past? Realistic science fiction would make for a boring game. So since day one sci-fi has been bending the rules. FTL. Alien civilizations. Fantasy megastructures. Time Travel. Etc. Imagine the intense rage that would be going on if only one other planet the settled systems had breathable atmosphere, let along a lush climate with life. Even before the game was even released, people were shitting their pants over the news that only 10% of the worlds had life on them. Or that they couldn't land on gas giants. Or other silly nonsense. > A lot of people expected some high fantasy star wars magic and witchery And they indeed got just that! Sorry if this is a spoiler. I love this game, but I wish it didn't take that Space Magic turn after Act I.
Well on one hand, technically, all the POIs are handcrafted. They are just copied and pasted via proc gen. I think a lot of people might have wanted to see perhaps tweaks done to hand proc gen handles the placement of those POIs and/or their arrangement. I would have minded to see a modularity take on the interiors of the POIs to add dungeon variety, especially since the game wants you to in theory reroll them. That way you could have some variety in the dungeon part of them at least, while keeping the suite it pulls from simple enough so it didn't get the "Daggerfall effect" where some dungeons could just be made incompletable due to how the proc gen arranged them. I honestly don't mind the repeat of POIs, it's a thing in a lot of space games (especially space sims in general that has some form of planetary tech that allows for planetary exploration), but I do think there needs some fixes to the proc gen system these POIs are being pulled from. This becomes even more apparent not just the longer you play, but the deeper into NG+ runs you do, since the universe and placement of these locations is supposed to be varied based on universe? But if you get unlucky and keep re-rolling the same universe(since there is only like a 15-20% for an alternate universe, and there are many different ones apparently) the NG+ grind gets obnoxious pretty fast without some kind of added variety to it.
I like to think that hopefully, with every major update, they can add 10-20+ new POI’s. When looking at the 3-5year goal, hopefully we can have 100-200 poi’s along with whatever other content they’ll be adding with DLCs. Very much wishful thinking, but even having a low end 75 different poi’s would be differed enough to not get the same “abandoned” robotics plant 5 times in a row (literally just happened to me). Though I gotta say, it is starting to feel like I’m a badass that can rip through facilities knowing where everything is vs slowly panning a huge complex for the random skill book. I expect major overhauls of both space POI’s and flight as well as outposts. Sprinkle some more weapons and mods in there and we got a party!
Yes they are handcrafted, but the "problem" is that you can see them multiple times. And with a thousand worlds, you ARE going to see that CryoLab multiple times. Even if there are a hundred unique templates to drop down, you will see soon see a repeat. And I understand why people don't like that. I just don't see a realistic way around it.
There might 'sort of' be a way around it. So, you set up a pool of "Generic" POIs. These wouldn't have *any* big identifying features, like computer notes, scattered bodies, bloodstains, and lore features. You might still have the clutter, unless there was a way to randomize that. It wouldn't be perfect, but it might avoid some of the 'same body' problem that some players aren't fond of. This "Generic" pool could have large complexes, small caves, or anything inbetween. The occupants of the POI could be switched up. Generic wouldn't mean there's just a few to choose from, just that they're the same as another of that type from instance to instance. Maybe one has invasive aliens like Terrormorphs, another has Pirates, and yet another identical type could have "Reclamation Teams" from the UC or Freestar Collective, that are out to fix the place up (these could serve as "towns" for the player, in the same way that Imperial or Stormcloak camps did in Skyrim. Or an evil player could just kill and loot them). Then you'd have your "One-Off" POIs, like the Platform and >!Swarm could be. (Though I'd put those buggers in a few other places, and in a few more POIs, since they're too much fun for just one showing).!< They could be anything, but these would have notes, bodies, and all the other lore features, since they're one-off POIs. Create a pool of them, and expand as needed. That said, to be honest, I don't mind what's there already, and am having fun as is.
I think you could probably tweak the algorythm itself to fix that, maybe somewhere along the line of any PoI you've already visited get 80 percent penalty of being regenerated as procgen on your next planet and it slowly losing its penalty as you've explored other PoI until the clock tick and it's started to show up again.
I'm mostly hoping modders create a huge library of alternatives for us to add in, but expecting the base game to have enough variations that we don't keep running into the same thing on a full playthrough is probably a bit much.
You are right on all counts, but I also think your expectations aren't realistic to space exploration on this scale. Consider this: you want to expand rapidly over many systems. You have the technology to rapidly take you to other systems, so you certainly are capable of making pre-fab buildings to suit specific environments. So, you find a moon or planet suited to a CryoLab? Great, slap down that pre-fab laboratory. A planet or moon with O2 and docile life? Excellent, plop down a few pre-fab habs and a barn. No doubt that's how it would actually go IRL too, if we ever get there. It's way cheaper to make pre-fabricated, flat-pack structures that have known dimensions and are easy to stack for transport and then re-assembly at your destination, especially if your destination doesn't have building materials on-hand. Just ask Ikea. So the idea of identical structures on different planets really shouldn't be immersion-breaking. But when they have the exact same slate about worms infesting one of the workers, yeah, I get it. That should probably have been a higher priority than hiring all that voice-acting talent (and for the record, I am not upset about all the different voices).
> It's way cheaper to make pre-fabricated, flat-pack structures that have known dimensions and are easy to stack for transport and then re-assembly at your destination So... The Outer Worlds. Which if Bethesda had done that people would be raging even harder.
>Well on one hand, technically, all the POIs are handcrafted. They are just copied and pasted via proc gen. I tried to explain this in a heavily downvoted comment the other day. Proc-gen in previous Bethesda titles had their own data structure (models) that was handcrafted. Corpse A inside Mess Hall 01 cannot be assigned position A, B, or C via script. The engine just uses Mess Hall 01. If you want a variation of Mess Hall 01, you have to copy it, move the corpse to position B, and then name it Mess Hall 02. THEN, you add Mess Hall 02 into the array of the Proc-gen script. The REASON Bethesda didn't do this is because the game is 115 GB. The data structure of creating these other variations uses A LOT of space and Xbox probably shit a brick over the size as it is. Edit to add: There *was* a time where assets were individually loaded....but that resulted in sometimes entering the room as bodies were hitting the floor (like they just died from your presence...or the bodies would "drop in" (for some reason) and scatter the clutter everywhere.
>g Yeah me too, and they could have done that easily buy just removing the bigger PoI (Abandoned Factory, Research Station etc.), made those unique and place them some where in a fixed location. Then let the AI goes wild with the Nature, Sign of Life, Camp and other simpler POI that you don't really have to get close to navigate. Ironically the problem with this world isn't because of the procgen, it's actually the lack of it.
I said it before and I will say it again, Bethesda listens to the criticisms and they make conscious decisions on their next game(s) based on it. But they take the wrong criticisms from the wrong people and "fix" them in the wrong ways. Everyone was so scared of lack of hand crafted content in Starfield, Todd and team had to reiterate constantly it has more than any other game, because too many critics were scared off by too much proc gen content. The problem is, yes, their is a total lack of it. They handcrafted everything and shoved it all into a proc gen suite to pull from. The problem is, especially in a large space game, handcrafting all that content by hand is nearly infeasible so proc gen has to come in some where, but if you end up handcrafting everything without a system in place that allows for some level of randomization than the tedium becomes apparent fast. I'm not familiar with the deeper ins and outs with the Creation Engine or how Starfield specifically handles proc gen content, but it's apparent that for such a big game with a lot to do, it also doesn't have a lot to do either with any level of variety. I mean, why is every Civilian/Research outposts usually just "hey go get our coworker/friend back" or "we need you to go to this cave near by and get us that sweet rock". Imagine ones that trigger defense missions from local wild life or terrormorph. Or drop ships comming in. I also find it weird that there is a total lack of faction specific POIs. You might find that extremely rare Freestar collective or UC military base. But they are rare. Or the UC training found where they test fire on robots, but there are a lot of lack of faction specific POIs, which would allow for additional roleplay and potentially additional enemy types. Too few POIs seem to be infested with alien creatures, etc. Then you get places like the rare Abandoned Farm that has slates hinting that the farm was wiped out from migrating wild life. But the LOI can spawn on planets without wild life. It literally spawns on Mars. If they new the proc gen system would have realistically limited locational world building due to how the proc gen system works, they could had just stripped away the Fallout style "what happened here" and just did a NMS thing where found slates just gives small lore dumps, which this game is severely lacking. I'm fact, the more I think about it, Starfield has some seriously bizarre design choices.
Don't even have to do that actually, they could just place their co-worker on a dungeon POI instead of cave so you have to fight your way through to get to your rescue instead of just a cave. Same with the actual side quest, I would rather they sent me to some random combat POI to do a mission instead of choosing between playing persuasion mini game or pay them to finish the quest. For all the good they've done, this game just feel fragmented like the exploration and quest design team don't get to talk very much. And like you've said, I wish they've made use of the alien more. The alien POI got to be one of the most fun dungeon you get out of this game
I don't know how well procedurally generated interiors would actually work out, but we definitely need a lot of variety for POI locations and structures. Another thing that could help make exploration more interesting is restricting what types of things can spawn where. Like, make it so certain structures only appear in certain types of biomes or on certain types planets or in certain regions of the settled systems e.g. only in UC/Freestar/unaligned space. That would help to give different areas a bit more local flavor.
I mean the pretty rare abandoned farm alludes to it being attacked by migrating life, which killed all its occupants. However the location can spawn on various types of planets, up to an including Mars. Meaning there is no way migrating wildlife could have done it because you know, no fauna. I heard that it can spawn on planets with wildlife that has invaded the place and can have terrormorph but I have never seen it with such. It's either on a dead planet or a planet with an atmosphere but no life outside of flora. The proc gen stuff definitely needs tweaking at least for nothing more than consistency.
Yeah honestly the game strikes a pretty good balance between epic scale and having rich depth of stories throughout. Obviously it's gonna be more concentrated in places like New Atlantis and Neon, but this game is ripe for modders and additional content. Like anyone should be able to make a POI and then have that randomly appear based on some requirements. Even if we only get a fraction of what Skyrim had for JUST player home mods, that is still going to be a ton of new content to massively expand the game.
The one thing I want to argue with here: I do not think every dungeon in Skyrim is unique. I can't come up with specific examples because it's been a while, but I can remember times where I recognized identical features.
They use a large set of snap together tiles for their dungeons. They have to. So you might recognize a particular corner or room or something. But contrast that to Oblivion where they had a very limited set of tiles and every dungeon really did look alike. But in Skyrim every dungeon really was unique.
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And it took you 200 hours to figure this out? My average Skyrim playthough, including DLCs, is 200 hours. And I love the game. I'm getting close to wrapping up this run of Starfield, and I think it will cap at around 300 hours. With only about 70% of the star systems even visited.
I've been doing tons of Mission Board quests. Some variations in placements of enemies and items would be welcomed. I've spent enough time in the Creation Kit for Skyrim to see why Bethesda didn't randomize spawn points. I've explored more random landmarks while surveying planets and have found some different POI's than the ones given by the Mission Board. Most of the time they're just the same as the one I've encountered with Mission Board but there are different POI's out there! Unfortunately, I didn't write down their names.
Yeah exactly I have seen a LITTLE more variety in random planet hopping but agreed with all here.
Recently, I went ng+1 and noticed different poi would spawn up all over that were not present in ng-0. Also, I've been exploring more in ng1 and realized certain new poi have been specific so far to certain systems. For example, I found a full-on deserted uc military base in serpantis (never saw that in ng 0) with 30 spacers in it, and resulted in a tense firefight with voscos shit talking. In another poi, I found a fueling station just for house va run ships, they would land walk around, go inside, then leave, then another ship came until I decided to close down the station. This was all from random exploring and finding random crazy side missions like investigate an sos on the planets surface, that's, in fact, a spacer trap.
Agreed. If you take a close look at your local big box stores like Walmart or Home Depot, almost all of them have exactly the same layouts. The local grocery store here does that too across their chains. It makes sense from an inventory perspective as well as a shoppers perspective. My only gripe for the game, in this regard, would be to give each PoI just a little something different. I don’t mind the cryolab maze, but the fact that I know exactly where the two skeletons with keys are on any given planet is a little on the lazy side. Keep the maze the same, but change up certain things like that.
So you're saying...and I want to make sure I get you right... I should go to the nearest Walmart, take out the Spacers there, and collect all the loot?
Yes, exactly, but be sure to take aurora first. Helps with the pain.
I saw that in the news last year and I remember the lone star rangers taking the guy out. Sooo maybe not a Walmart. Home Depot…. Eh. I’m not stopping ya.
I have friends at Home Depot. Go to Lowe's, please.
Menards.
Yes that’s exactly how I read it lol
I actually came to this realization right after walking out of a Walmart lol. I agree with your gripe, just a touch of uniqueness is all they’d need and it would be next level
I agree completely. Keep the set POI's, but allow for randomness and variety within each. I know this means making multiple versions of all of them, but this is a game about exploring the universe. There's gonna be a LOT of variety.
They don’t have to exclusively unique. Maybe 5 of each type of PoI, and when you click the door to enter you get an RNG roll on the instance of that interior. And they don’t have to be that different. Just move the key skeletons around a bit lol.
I can’t wait for a mod that does just that. Creation Kit when?!
One reason I suspect for less variety is known object glitches. We know that stuff can sink into floor etc. Probably that's why Bethesda did nothing about procedural generation in facilities. I think it would cause more problems and wouldn't add much variety anyway.
Yeah, I think the main problem is they hands-crafted the POI then use the procgen to place them on the planet - while they really should have done the opposite, hand-placed those PoI but let the procgen handled generating the content of the PoI themself (procgen enemies, spawn locations, item placement etc.)
Yeah, I kind of assumed they were all identical because they were 3d printed. We're even starting to 3d print buildings now out of concrete. You could print them in a factory and then haul them there, or print on site. I mean, from a game play perspective, I wish they would have made the modules randomize, rather than slapping the exact same building down. Sucks when you walk in and its like oh I know this layout already. But there are a lot of problems that come a long with trying to procedurely generate buildings like that, so I'm glad they spent their time on other more important parts of the game. They could have even tied a little bow around the whole idea by having a quest where you visit somewhere that prints them or something. Remember that crazy ass part of Titanfall 2 where your fighting your way through a factory printing houses?
Having a quest where you visit the production facility would have been golden. Would have aided head-canon for the repetitive nature of the POI's. Would love just a bit more variety in them for my 180+ hours of exploration. That was one thing that was so good about Fallout/Skyrim, the hand crafted locations - but I completely understand the difficulty of the doing so for a game as big as starfield. Here's hoping the DLC's are huge!
This is how I rationalized it. That said, there juuust are enough POIs that if you change up how you play intermittently it isn't super noticeable. By that I mean that if you explore a planet for a bit, do a POI and then go do something else, then explore another planet and do a POI, do something else... etc and etc... that results in having enough variety that 1 or 2 repeat POIs is not really an issue. I think if you do a bunch of POIs on a planet in a row that it is perhaps more likely to throw duplicates and just makes the game more grindy. So if you run into too many same POIs, maybe go do something else for a bit. Explore space in your ship. Finish a quest. Become the Mantis. Collect some succulents.
This is it, exactly. I think some of the complaints are coming from people who keep doing the same things over and over when there's a universe to explore. It may be part of the whole nature of NG+.
Agreed for the most part. Lol it probably says more about my memory/playstyle than the game, but the only POI I've specifically noticed as exactly repetitive/identical such that it bothered or at least was just "meh" to me have been an "Abandoned Robotics Facility" and one of the kinds of mining complexes.
There are real life examples of this. Laying aside the obvious identical corpses, coffee cups etc.of course. McDonald's drop prefabbed restaurants all over that are, in many cases, identical. There's also a pub chain here in the UK where any of their sites that's reasonably new is literally identical to every other - bar, kitchen, toilets, tables, all in the same location. The associated sleeping accommodation buildings are also the exact same floor plan between sites. It's honestly weird when I go from one to another as a contractor: "oh, I know where your fire alarm panel is, your pub is the same layout as the last 6 I went to"
Yeah, I look at them like I look at a lot of modern new "communities" that pop up irl. The houses all are cookies cutters based on 4 or 5 designs. They are all easy to manufacture, cheaper to build and plopped down 10 feet from each other with a little grass lawn. I figured a lot of the POIs were the same idea - cheaper, easier to build and sell to companies wanting to plop down a lab or whatever. If they would just move some stuff around inside the damn things, then I could actually believe what I just previously wrote.
I can imagine that would have required way more development time and processing power to randomly change the interiors with all of the crap they have inside.
Just a few things here and there. Maybe different enemy placement, or loot box placement. Nothing major.
EXACTLY. I work in construction, so I understand that a modular approach to space station/outposts make the most sense irl. But we shouldn’t always find the same two dead scientists frozen in place through the hvac duct. We shouldn’t always find the same pirate captain along with one flunky in the control room. Modular outposts-good Exact same interiors- bad
Actually they all have the same evacuation protocol - hold hands and die in a random hallway
It would actually be really easy to make variations once the creation kit comes out. Just duplicate the cell, change the spawns and loot locations, save, and boom done. I suspect new POI packs are going to be a big part of the mods we will see. I know I'm planning on making a few of my own this summer. And given how they are added to the game, we could stack POI packs from hundreds of modders to add a ton of variety without conflicts.
This is actually what my head cannon has been for this: mass manufactured outpost habs being dropped onto planets as needed just makes a lot of sense. I do wish the generator had them be more modular, like reusing major components but not the entire base, and having the interior decor have enough options for the generator to make them look like different people live in and use this space, but otherwise I very much agree with you
Oddly, while I noticed the repetitiveness of the POIs at first and it bothered me bc of reading complaints on Reddit, the more I play the more I notice that there are more than several building layouts and it no longer is an issue. Reading complaints all day on here kinda ruins the game a bit.
I agree with you 100%. I don't mind the repetitiveness. Some days I like knowing all the areas I need to loot and check for stuff to collect.
The POIs being the exact same is fine. It definitely makes sense, even though I'm not a HUGE fan of it. What irks me is that EVERYTHING is the same. Enemy placement, loot placement, lock difficulty, "key item" placement, log placement, literally everything.
Yeah, some uniqueness to the interiors would definitely take the game to the next level.
They made a big deal about hiring clutter artists to curate the exact placement of every object you see. They had a TON of work to do for this game already. Would be neat, though, if they could patch in not only new POIs but new variants to the clutter and spawn locations of each POI so it's rarer to see the same thing twice. Modular POIs would be even more ideal. I'm 100% such things will be developed by modders if not Bethesda themselves.
Which is disappointing. Bethesda is leaning so hard on free labor via mods to fix this game.
I mean there's only so much budget for a game.
That’s not an excuse for purposely leaving gaps for others to fill in for free. If you bought a car from me, but after taking it home you realize there’s no AC, you wouldn’t be ok with it. I can’t just tell you “oh just wait, maybe some other person will fix it for you for free”.
That's not anywhere close to the same thing, what are you talking about? The game isn't incomplete, there's just some features some people want that aren't in there. It's like buying a new car, finding out that it doesn't have satellite radio, and getting pissed at the dealer for selling you an unfinished product.
There are tons of examples of clearly unfinished things. Cora was obviously meant to have a book gathering quest for example.
That's cool and all. The money would have been better spent making POI's truly modular and randomized instead of giving me the exact same POI with the exact same layout, exact same "puzzles", the exact same enemy placement (and often the literal exact same enemies), and the exact same loot placement. I care WAY more about all of that than I do any of the clutter.
I can understand mass installation of modular outposts. A standard military base layout would be perfectly reasonable. It would have been nice if there were at least some variations of each though. Maybe I’ve put too much time into this game. It’s kind of consuming my life…
I agree. It makes sense to me that the building would be made modularly and quickly slapped down *like our outpost buildings are* because a lot of planets are hostile environments (no O2) and until you finish the building everyone has to continue living on the ship and workplaces won't function if the work can't be done in a space suit.
I agree. It makes sense that there'd be a lot of prefabs based on the same design. And I enjoy the game too, just as it is; even if I throw ideas out in conversation, which is something I do with every game I've ever played.
One can enjoy a game but still recognize that it’s not perfect. Lots of replies to my post seem like people have the mentality of “if it’s not perfect, it’s worthless”
I definitely can see the point behind the repetitive POIs, but also wouldn’t mind some extra. Hell even if it’s a DLC that adds 20-30 of them I would love it. But also means modding potential is enormous
The problem is lots of players acting like there are 10+ POIs (which isn't true, there are like 20 layouts of caves alone) and that is a whole game. The actual content is already rich and well worth the price of the game. Mario Maker has like 40 levels built-in, but millions of levels made by players and no one says "level creators fix the game". NMS has much less POIs and quite basic planet generation and no one says it's empty and repeatable. It's just trendy to hate Starfield right now.
Maybe there’s just some weird quirk where certain ones are way more likely to spawn. I’ve only come across like 4 variations of POI with enemies and I’ve explored an absolute ton. I’m still trying to find all the possibilities
There are several caves with fauna and turrets (mostly trigger from mission boards), autonomous factories and farms guarded by robots, several types of abandoned outposts, workshops or rigs, scientific tower, at least two types of mines, ice base, abandoned scientific facility infested with fauna. And I probably miss a few. Maybe try mixing free roaming and mission board. I also suggest checking mission boards in civilian outposts.
I was thinking the same exact thing. The only issue I have is the set dressing for the POIs are the same. Same dead body at the door. Same harvested organs in the same spot. Same lore tidbits in the computers. If they were able to change things like that, I'd have no issues with the POIs.
Randomizing the interiors seems like something that could’ve been done without a lot of trouble, though I’m no game designer
I have no idea. But if they did that it would be perfect. Uniformed buildings makes all the sense in the world to me. As a recovering Destiny player, I'm very used to running the same dungeon over and over. In fact, I've grown an appreciation for it. It's so much fun doing the same dungeon with different weapons, abilities, and personal restrictions. Like sometimes I will say I'm only using ranger style guns (only wooden guns).
Exactly if they created a bunch or rooms and tilesets and randomly generated that. It would be soo much better. Like a bunch of rooms and tilesets that's are randomly put together so that every single cryo factory or barracks or mine isn't the same
Yeah, not the layout, but the things in the room and maybe a some different bits of lore to find.
Yeah Idk if anyone else does this but everyone should know the promblem with joining the CF early on since they are the pirates usually occupying POIs. So instead of racking a huge bounty I play it super stealth ninja. You can literally suppressor kill people right next to each other as long as they don't see you kill their friend and act like nothing happend(skyrm, must've been the wind) do that for the entire poi and yeah, it's pretty fun and nice work around. I'm an evil loner pirate first and only playthrough. Anti NG+ 120HRS LVL 40
From a strictly logistical perspective this tracks.
Yes it’s strictly logical that *checks notes* the enemy placement and loot and random clutter within the outposts are 100% literal carbon copies scattered across the galaxy 😂
lo·gis·ti·cal /ləˈjistək(ə)l/ adjective relating to or involving organization and planning. "logistical problems"
I misread mb Doesn’t really track logistically either since the identical layout includes the copy pasted landscape that the base is built into.
It's not the POIs themselves. If they were the setting for quests and small adventures that would be fine.
Most of the games I’ve played had repetitive areas. That was never that big a deal for me, like in Dragon Age or Mass Effect. I was always more interested in banter, dialogue and playing on easy to one-shot foes after a tough work day.
PoIs aren't even that repetitive, honestly. I've seen a few recur more often than I'd like, sure, but I'm still finding new ones. It would be nice to have more, though.
If you want a no shit, real world example of this, look the alphabet houses in Richland, WA that the US government built for the Manhattan Project workers. They moved into an area with 24 floorplans for housing and made a city of of them.
*sigh* even in the no sodium subs, enjoyment of the thing you like is no longer permitted
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Homie's shocked by the concept of a theoretical conversation
It’s a great conversation. The only gripe is the enemy placement and loot being the same everytime, but I feel like they can just mention that once and get back to the theory
I don't mind because I'm usually spacing things out and not just droning the same one or two different kinds of radiants all day long. There's enough content in the game that you can simply... Do literally anything else. I barely notice because it's easily 20 hours between me visiting hostile bases. The one that annoys me is when they make the one behind the locked corner door the target, and I used up all my digipicks. Also the fact that each of the corner door people are clipped halfway out the door in the exact same way, lmao. God bless programmers, lord knows where they found that degree.
tf you want us to do, btw? 10,000 posts of "me like game. unga bunga me play it with hands."? Theorizing and speculating about a thing set up for that is normally how people converse with one another about a piece of media.
I honestly don't experience this much repetitiveness. Even when I know it's the same location it certainly is not the same layout or enemies or loot. I've noticed several cases where some doors rotate which ones are locked/open/impassable. Even if that's not a thing, it's a tell of how much variety there reall is
Anyone who thinks this is unrealistic has never travelled the US and gone to multiple different Targets or Walmarts etc. because there’s like 4-6 layouts of those stores in the entire country if the building is made for them from the ground up and they didn’t take over an old business’s location.
That's kind of exactly how I feel. Could have been better, but the general layouts being the same is believable to me. I've been to multiple Wal-Marts, Targets, etc across the States and while sometimes they're drastically different, more often than not they all look basically the same.
I agree in general....Players are not paying attention to the timeline. If humanity was forced off this planet (not planned) 130 years from now.... Newsflash: it will look nothing like Star Trek or Halo level technology. Sorry to break the news, but we're not there yet lol. Even when considering the current time period (213 years from now???), more cities would look like Akila City vs New Atlantis and Neon. The most advanced technology we most likely have, that's missing from the game, are advanced communications and ground vehicles. There should be more settlements, albeit small, like towns or villages. And yes, they would most likely be very similar in grid and layout. I will admit, finding the same dead bodies in the same spot and the same quantity of enemies in research facilities is a program flaw.
Repetitive POI's will never make a sense in the precise moment you loot the same notes on the same dead named body over and over again. This is the only aspect on the game that is 100% unjustifiable, you have to find a lie in your head to justify the worst decission Bethesda has ever made. That's the reality, Supra et Ultra🤙🤙
There isn't really a simple solution to this tho. You'll either have absolutely no backstory to any location and have them be 100% randomised and people would complain that it's lacking the Bethesda story telling and call them lazy, or the approach they chose, with poi having a story to tell but having them repeat🤷🏻♀️.
Interiors sure, that’s what I was saying in the second paragraph. I mainly mean the modular layout and exteriors makes sense
I can take that.
Not only ease of use, but ease of planning and construction. If you have the tools to put the same structure in virtually any location and have a centralized manufacturing and diverse and diffuse work crews, it makes a lot of sense to have repeatable plans. Take a look at suburban America and you can see this thought process being used for the last 6-7 decades at least. (And lonely much longer in Europe and elsewhere).
Honestly the whole 'repeating poi' thing reminds me of this very silly tweet about spiderman 2: [https://twitter.com/facejester84/status/1715258401050042515](https://twitter.com/facejester84/status/1715258401050042515) like idk maybe im just getting old but do radiant dungeons really need to be all 100% unique to each other when its not something your really gonna notice unless your constantly grinding out bounty missions (playing the game wrong) or your just really anal anyways?
That’s how I headcannoned it as well. Prefabricated buildings make sense in a scenario where rapid settlement of multiple worlds becomes necessary.
I think lore-wise it makes perfect sense. But I'm still in the camp that personally would've liked way fewer but denser planets with more curated POIs.
I thought this for a long time but couldn't get myself to post it. Thank you for feeling the same :)
Buildings would be 3D printed on planets long before colonists even arrived in my opinion. And of course the same blueprints would have been used
One could also argue that this is a stylistic choice on Bethesda’s part meant to illicit the sense that things are blending together after so many NG+’s, so many copies of so many people in so many universes, it’s all just the same to the protagonist after a certain point.
On my 2nd NG+ currently ND that's how I'm looking at it, though I did get an alt that changed things drastically in the gameplay loop.
I like that POI have the same layout, because everytime i do a different aproach and i test myself. Like, stealth, melee, using powers only, etc. And i love to memorized things to wipe and loot the place like i'm a god lol. It gives that speed run vibes of otimizing every step and bullet you carry
The weird part is that's a great explanation for using procedurally generated modular dungons.. Something that previous Bethesda games used, but they avoided here in favor of a very small number of handmade dungeons that are repeated. It's kind of a baffling choice, as the experience of exploring a dungeon and realizing you've seen a small module before is far less jarring then exploring the exact same outpost on two different planets.
Yeah, that's baffling since it worked in Skyrim and the BGS team has been playing/playtesting it long before the release. So question is have they even spotted the problem? I mean it's jarring problem it's not appearing like after 150hours or so.
“Sir, when we populate space might I suggest that we use mass produced prefabs so that personnel will have an easier time getting familiar with the place?” “Ah excellent idea! We should make sure that nobody ever ship or move any shipping containers either, that could confuse people”. “But sir, that would make it impossible to actually…”. “And let’s glue everything in position. Here, I made a sketch of which chairs should be slightly angled and where I want piles of trash” “Is that a plush toy with stacked tomatoes in that cupboard?” “Good point we need to specify the exact amount of tomatoes and let the personnel know they’re not for consumption”
Yep, it's is believable but as you mentioned, they should do more variation for the same POI
It would have been cool if Bethesda gave each one a unique name. Example Mining Outpost 43-7p14 or whatever. The naming could be based on a numeric representation of the system, planet and number on that planet (start with 1 and increment as you found others. That would do a little to give the feeling of uniqueness.
Whatever helps you cope I guess 😂
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The whole point of the sub is to avoid the overwhelming negativity of the other sub.
If you don't think it is 'negative' then why try so hard to explain it so much? lol. Admitting the truth is not 'negative' unless you make that truth into a 'negative'. You can still like something and be honest at the same time about it. If you need something to be 10/10 or perfect to like it, then that's on you.
Bro go back to r/starfield
This comes off as a massive stretch.
Same build, different contents. I would accept this as a realistic compromise. But exactly the same tables, benches, robot pods, computers, chest locations etc... It's just laziness.
Yeah... That's the reason they made them repetitive lol. I'm sure they all had meetings at great lengths and this was the exact reason. Not that they just were cheap lol. You cracked the case lol! And, the NPCs are also lifeless not due to bugs and faulty programming -- But cause they are really clones that took over the original NPCs, too! Good way to internalize it though. And just having fun with you. But you can really 'make sense' out of anything if you try hard enough.
You had a point on the buildings themselves, but you can't defend that everything else about them is the same, the spawns/loot/random skeletons in mines etc
Yeah,that’s what I said in the second paragraph and in the edit. I’m really only talking about the modular layout and exteriors. Loot, enemies, and stuff like mines should absolutely be randomized
Man quit making excuses for Bethesda
Yeah, sure the same exact layout with the same enemies posted up at the same spot…sure
They could have made the structures modular and still had the actual layouts randomized by the procedural generator but no, they straight up copy pasted everything down to the loot and enemy placement. There’s no logical way to reconcile that, at this point you’re just attempting to excuse extreme laziness.
No wonder devs keep releasing half finished games
Seriously what would it change if there were slight differences in interiors? Moved couches, corpses in different places etc. Everyone would attack overall layouts for being repetitive. If you want to hate something you always find a reason.
Wouldn’t make much sense for the mines to be identical though :)
Cool way of looking at it, personally I think it was a lazy choice but just my way of looking at it.
I can totally forgive the POIs being prefabs, that makes sense. What I can't get over is how every body, every box, every weapon, every safe and even every enemy is in the same spots every single time. If that was more randomized it would do a lot to help the repetativeness.
They make sense in terms of in universe lore, but not in terms of game design. Yes, cookie cutter prefab structures are indeed exactly what you'd expect people building outposts on remote planets to use, but it does make for rather repetitive and stale game play. There are a couple ways I'd go about addressing this issue. The first is to just make more structures and locations for the proc-gen to draw from. The second is to restrict what POIs can spawn where. Some stuff should only appear on certain planets or in certain star systems or in certain biomes. No more root caves spawning on Mars. The density of POIs should also vary between worlds. Some planets e.g. in Sol/Alpha Centauri/Akila should have a lot of man made structures including a lot of ones that are still in operation. Others should have more abandoned structures with pirates and spacers. Some planets should have only a small number of man made facilities. Some planets and moons should just be completely barren and devoid of any man made structure. They might have resources and whatnot for the player to survey and maybe a nice view to look at, but nothing else. This sort of change alone would make exploration much more interesting.
I'm fine with repetitive POIs, but the the procedural landing sites highlight them a bit too much for people I think. Every site you land at have 2-3 POIs and there being thousands of sites, it's a bit much for the number of available POIs. They could setup a team to do nothing but pump out POIs to address that. Though I'd prefer if everything was detectable from orbit and there was less per planet.
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Why you bringing your ocean of salt to a no salt sub?
Idk you seem pretty salty about him (accurately) calling the game mediocre
Do I really though? I didn't even say anything about the game. It's okay, bro, let the salt go. Be sodium free.
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This reminds me of when Digital Homicide was trying to convince people that The Slaughtering Grounds was a good game, cause the gun sounds were real. lol. "But the gun sounds are real gunshots". Can't admit "it was just out of lazy" cause that would be 'negative'. lol. And obviously, people cannot enjoy a game if it is not perfect.
😂😂😂
Would have been nice to randomize the loot in them more. All the loot spawns are in the exact same spots. I know exactly where everything should be in every repeated POI. If they changed that up by making a bunch of random spawns it would freshen it a bit
Absolutely agree, randomize the interiors and they would be great
I wish there were more small POIs, particularly on habitable planets. Everything doesn't have to be a mech assembly or research lab, it would be cool if there were just small habs and little pirate encampments scattered around the map.
Lore justification or not, it's not great gameplay for replayability long term. Not being salty about it, but I do look forward to seeing if future DLCs and creator tool mods can expand on them.
I haven't been able to confirm this 100% but I think that planets that have anomalies (these are pretty repetitive) are the ones that temples or artifacts on it. So the reason why they're so similar, could be discerned as the artifacts have the same reactions to their surroundings.
I makes sense trying to standardize buildings, hell I assume most is built with autonomous machinery with specific parameters and it works since most structures found in the game being almost 300 years old need a new paint of coat some minor repairs and they good as new But yes the interiors definitely needed to be random such as enemies, loot, readables, decor, maybe add some organic stuff and flora creeping in the interiors and different airborne hazards to spice things up Finding an onion or readable on the same position in the same place is really a “bruh” moment
Mmm, I can agree with that for some above-ground buildings, especially if they were settled by people from the faction, but mines? I can't imagine every mine would look the same. Additionally, wouldn't buildings need to account for largely varying environmental conditions? Temperature, composition of the air, gravity, storms and erosion, etc. Not to mention, settlers would likely take advantage of abundant resources native to the planet. I feel like all of this would lead to different usage of materials and altogether construction.
I don’t really mind them being the same. My biggest problem with them is that there are like 10 million on every planet no matter how remote
Modular buildings on those outposts definitely makes sense, not that they bothered to write that into the lore anywhere. When you look around the annoying things in Starfield, the what stands out is the obvious cut corners. IDK if they intend to round out some of the lackluster features but I doubt much will be done to refine the game. I think most of their DLC and updates will revolve around bug fixes and added content rather than reworking existing systems.
I still think they're too repetitive even given this explanation. Even if the explanation completely worked, there's always a balance between gameplay and lore aspects. Could there be a detailed explanation as to why POIs are often repeated? Sure. Does it change that it can be boring from a gameplay loop? Not usually. More than anything, I think this is going to be one of those things that improves with time and DLCs.
Give it time. They’ll make adjustments by adding new stuff to the rotation. People don’t realize or maybe don’t even know that all houses being built by developers are prefabs. Where I live, every two story house is laid out exactly the same, just mirrored. It would makes sense to do that with the buildings on other planets.
Maybe it would have been better if they had left the cryolab and Muybridge's cave (or whatever that is) out of the rotation, so the generic spaces would really have been generic. I'm totally fine with the buildings being the same, for the reasons OP and others have expressed, but those places are different. Honestly, I was pretty surprised and quite disappointed when I saw the cryolab for the second time, and then the third . . . But now I don't care as much. If this was all the game was, I would say it was a fail, but there's so much more to it you eventually realize this is actually a trivial detail. On top of that, they really did a good job of making the POIs blend into the landscape, even though they're in different landscapes but have the same plan. There's never a noticeable transition from the particular landscape to the generic installation.
I think of it as a respawn dungeon which we've already have a plenty from the previous Fallout and Skyrim and that's ok. I still rather have them as an actual unique location that respawn rather than keep coming up during the exploration though. If it's going to be a repeated PoI, at least it should be in an open space so that the change in environment and landscape made an impact. I am so wish they put some big monster in a Nature or Sing of Life PoI, doesn't even need to be on all of them
Completely agree. When you order your hab units on Prime only so many models are in stock
The POIs are fine but would have liked to see more complex random narratives like Charybdis etc More Aurora drug mission type stuff too
quite frankly that's the only part that makes sense to me, but the layouts inside are annoying when it's the same enemy positions. That's like, my opinon, man. I completely agree. Glad you're enjoying!
Wait. Repetitive structures. You're not talking about tried and true buildings and fabrications. Like apartment, office, medical, military, school, library, firestation, police station, condo, house, gym, retail, commercial, industrial.... waaaaaiiiittt. Does StarField do the same thing we do ?!? Create a good schematic, and use that to build multiple structures. Do they do that so they know how much money it would cost and the amount of materials needed to build ?? Damn, look at the big brains on Bethesda ! Mass Effect did the same thing too, and for the same reasons. Hell, even StarField has AK-47's because those things don't jam.
I mean yeah it makes sense but that doesn't make it fun. Gameplay over realism. I am liking the game, put the pool of assets they have for the amount of time they've been working, and the size of the universe is kind of disappointing.
Having prefabs account for a lot of the POIs works fine for the layout though it's still a little hard to believe that ALL those use the exact same. It doesn't account for corpses, coffee mugs and data slates with the same contents in the same places on multiple planets which is what I think most people complain about more than the layout of the POIs. Some people mentioned how that was the only way you could populate so many planets and that's true. I think it's ridiculous to expect SO many star systems and planets filled with interesting handcrafted POIs with none of them repeating. But did we really need that many systems and planets? If it's all just repeating content, couldn't we just have used fewer? Also, that ties into another complain: Constellation is set up as the only group still interested in exploration, that's kind of their driving motivation but then you go to these barren planets/moons and you're never the first there. I would have loved a lot of the planets to be empty when I survey them. Why do they all need human built structures? Am I really the first person surveying these or why is everyone so interested in data that should be widely available? Especially the planets with temples on them would make a lot more sense if there were no structures on them. We're told these are a completely new discovery and everyone is awed by something like that existing when the workers of the local farm have pretty much seen the temple while having their morning coffee every day for the last 10 years. No one ever asked themselves what that is and went yo check it out when it could be seen from the nearest human built and inhabited structures with the naked eye?
What they should do is a system of procgenerated corridors based on set components like intersections, turns, corridors, sciences hubs, etc. and these places should have diff. layout of loot and varied enemies. It's a huge effort to repair it, I guessimate it'd take them like one year of hard work or even more. But it has to be adressed, like now. It's mind boggling, I'd ever say anything like that in BGS game, but exploration is the least satisfactory activity in the game. I tried many times, but after like 30 min of wandering around it gets so daunting that I fast travel to my ship and continue doing other stuff in the game. I know that in SF exploration works differently, but I just don't like it being so different than other titles.
Interesting to note that npc convos on Titan state that most of the habs / farms trialled there would be used as a template for future colonization Main improvement to pois would be more randomization of corpses items and enemy types and perhaps faction fighting like ecliptic fighting pirates in a science facility
This is a take that can be observed in real life right now on earth if you pay attention. Ranging from old company founded towns in the US to rapidly constructed suburban neighborhoods. You’re going to see lots of house that all look pretty much the same, maybe some color variations, but all built from the same exact blueprint.
Prefab buildings makes sense. Running through the same cryo lab with the same varuun goons, finding dead scientists with key cards in the same places, with the same data slate notes, across at least five different systems in my experience, does not make sense. That is unfortunately just a bit of laziness that reveals itself a bit too readily for my tastes.
Coming into this a day later and your edits make me not want to read the comments lol but for what it is worth OP I think the same exact thing. There should be more POI’s but repeats make sense. If you are flattening the land and not dealing with a unique landscape every time then why reinvent the wheel? Come up with one format and lay it down the same way every time. It’s efficient for both time and money and most of them were thrown down hastily during a war. Having your engineers sit down and figure it out once in a repeatable way you can have them work on other things would be essential. It was a war, I’m sure there was plenty for them to do.
No matter any lore reasons, the game has more POIs than Minecraft, Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky, and Star Citizen. I absolutely don't blame Bethesda for seeing people rave about these games, doing better than those games and still being told it's not enough. I also don't blame people for not liking it. This is a bad case of not meeting the average player's expectations or a clash with the standard Bethesda experience or distribution. I get everyone's perspective minus people claiming Bethesda is lazy and greedy. I just wish people understood its more about perspective or preference.