Starfield
Starfield just introduced a new patch in its beta that adds some legitimately useful quality of life elements, difficulty levels, ship decoration, inventory tabs, actual city and surface maps. Vehicles will be added later. But I’m most excited about this new update, which they call Starfield: Visions:
- Discover a more varied and diverse universe in the Visions update. Introducing new planetary biomes, more colorful worlds, new fauna and flora, archaeology, salvage and much more…
- New anomalous planet biomes create a stranger, more diverse universe to explore.
- Bizarre creatures have evolved on anomalous planets, bringing new life and movement to these eerie landscapes.
- The universe has become more alien, more alive and more exciting to explore. New shades of sky and grass allow for more unique worlds and a more diverse range of science fiction aesthetics.
- New types of water create stranger worlds that can be discovered both above and below the surface.
- The atmosphere and air have improved and stormy weather conditions can now produce rainbows in the planetary atmosphere.
- Exotic planets can be searched to discover mysterious artifacts that can be claimed as trophies. These alien objects can be housed in habitable bases to create a showcase of your travels through the universe.
- With more varied planets comes more reasons to explore. Unleash your inner archaeologist and search the Milky Way for planets that contain the ancient bones of alien life forms. Complete, intact skeletons are extremely rare and especially valuable.
Oh sorry, that was a typo. I mean to say that this is the No one’s heaven Visions update, from November 2018. But the point I’m trying to make is, yes, outside of new missions and an expansion storyline, I think something like this is what Starfield needs most.
No one’s heaven
No Man’s Sky has done update after update to build out the game, but this is one that tried to get back to the original missions of exploring cool planets that were pretty bare bones at launch and often not very cool at all.
Starfield is certainly ahead of where No Man’s Sky was at launch in this regard, as I think it often has beautiful scenery, but I think it would benefit from significant revisions to the procedural generation systems to make these planets more interesting to explore, and give players a reason to go places they wouldn’t otherwise go to find things they can’t predict, rather than landing somewhere and finding the same eight types of civilian or pirate bases a distance away 500 meters apart.
The ultimate goal of Starfield, both conceptually from Bethesda and in-game if you join Constellation, is to explore the universe. But if you do, you’ll find that probably 950 of Starfield’s promised 1,000 planets contain nothing of note, or at least nothing you haven’t seen before in the endgame. Every now and then I came across it An something I may not have seen before, but those cases became more and more rare over time.
Starfield needs more interesting planets, both in appearance and biomes, but weather, flora, fauna and of course POIs that need to go well beyond what they have now, rather than as repetitive as they can be. I also like the NMS idea of rare trophies or relics that you can find as you explore, because the game doesn’t have anything crazy “rare” like that, and it would fit in well with the base/ship decoration.
I think following No Man’s Sky, with a budget at least 10x higher, is a good plan at least in this particular area. I mean, they’re already working on the No Man’s Sky land vehicle update, right?
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Pick up my science fiction novels Herokiller series And The Earthborn Trilogy.