Gaming

And this whole conversation overlooks one of the major complaints a player would have of Bethesda did the same thing.

Entering an atmosphere changes the physics and those physics are different for all sorts of reasons on every planetary body for every ship. From gravity to atmospheric density the ship would fly differently on every one and that ignores the fact that ships are near enough to infinite in configuration in this game due to the builder.

If Bethesda did this, players would be complaining it wasn't realistic enough.

This is basically what No Man's Sky did. When Bethesda took their crappy RPG engine and mocked up interplanetary travel using loading screens and then started writing quests and storylines, NMS focused on building a very good engine that allowed you to go from surface to air to space to interplanet / stellar while mostly ignoring the rest of gameplay and storytelling.

And not to be too hard on No Man's Sky given the resource differential, but ultimately all it is is one really rock solid system thats not quite a full game surrounded by a lot of hollow feeling stuff to kinda flesh it out on paper. Ultimately Starfield has way sharper hooks almost immediately simpy because while it has a relatively crappy engine and at time frustrating amounts of loading screens and limitations, they spent more time writing content and dialogue that makes the universe feel actually alive and rich, and polishing each individual system until it's fun.

I think The Outer Worlds is also worth comparing to as Obsidian is even farther down the same route as Bethesda imho, making a much smaller universe that feels even less free than Starfield but having even better writing and I would argue it's possibly the best game of the three though I have to withhold my judgement on Starfield until I atleast finish the main quests.

There's a mod for that

Farewell.

Elite is still just cleverly hidden/styled loading screens. No Mans Sky (and apparently Star Citizen but I haven't played it) is even better and more seamless.

I just don’t think it’s good to let a company get away with not improving.

The small improvements they have made in Starfield are alright, but it feels like the bar was set with Skyrim and they can’t even really match something from 12 years ago.

I do not have high hopes for TES VI and I’m half expecting something extremely dated, as based off FO4 and Starfield I think the studio’s best days are behind them at this point.

Oh wow. A truely stunning achievement for this small indie studio.

I do wish I could jump -> interact with them, but yeah they do. Decent animation too, if not a bit slow lol

FO4 power armor was close to a vehicle as they got but that might as well been horse code for all I know.

It does suck they can't do vehicles since it would be nice to have a motorcycle in Fallout or a mad max car.

Oh and Larians entire back catalog is great. They were definitely eurojank back then but Divine Divinity and Div2 is good games.

There have been a couple of mods for Fallout 4 and New Vegas to add vehicles. IIRC the only one that wasn't just an object floating across the ground was in that big expansion mod made by sex perverts, I forget what it's called. New something?

I see. In that case I fully expect someone to make a 'open cities' mod for systems. If you can reach the billboards it should be possible to create a transition to planet space. Maybe.

Lol, that's actually fucking hilarious.

That sounds exactly like the old Morrowind loading system. It was relatively seamless at the time for traveling about outdoors, sans the mini loading between these cells. It used to take a few seconds back in the day it was released but with modern SSDs it takes a fraction of a second.

Oblivion and Skyrim made this for the most part invisible. But loading times for indoor transitions still existed.

The worst thing for elite was being made by frontier as they are now. Frontier now is just a tycoon simulator game generator, that's all they care about. It's like the FIFA of the tycoon games... spit out another one every year or two and who gives a rats ass about the stuff we already made or haven't completed.

I loved what elite wanted to be, I hate what the bean counters did to it...

People shit on star citizen for their dev cycle, but elite took the worse route in my opinion: they released a minimally viable product and then intended on building it into something bigger, but got cheap/lazy and just accepted that what they have out is "good enough" so they dumped all the internal ship plans (braben spoke about boarding ships and piracy on foot in a ship, that kind of thing.) They dumped so much of the simulation stuff and just stuck with the BGS... it's frustrating to see what could have been.