this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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I don't think that's true. Elite Dangerous is one of my favorite games and it's procedurally generated. I think the issue is that that's not exactly what Starfield is.
When you "land" in Starfield (outside a handcrafted city or similar), you land in a procedurally generated box made just for you. It isn't repeatable by anybody but you. Other people who "land" in the same spot will not see what you saw, they get their own procedurally generated box. The contents of the box are similar (the terrain is the right color, the flora and fauna are the same). If you were to see something particularly cool in your box (although I never did when I was playing the game) - ie: "unusually tall mountain range" or "unusually deep valley" - you can't tell someone "hey go to coordinates x,y and check this out!" You CAN do this in Elite Dangerous. All worlds, all settlements - everything is the same for everyone, and if you explore through it all and you find something interesting, you can share it with people.
In Starfield, your box always contains an uninteresting/unremarkable patch of terrain and magically, literally everywhere you land, there are structures and ships within walking distance - none of which anyone can get to but you.
There is literally no WAY to explore. Everywhere you land, it's just another box and it will always contain the same variation on the same things. That isn't exploration. Exploration implies things that exist whether you are there or not and which can be found by someone if they look long enough.
This is the most precise presentation about what I hated about Starfield. I gave up about 5ish hours in when the 3rd planet I landed on to explore was literally the same as the first two. Maybe it was just me, maybe it was unlucky lottery, but the fast travel to multiple boxes with the same ingredients shaken up slightly was enough to make me walk away.
If people liked it, I’m very happy for them, it just didn’t do it for me and I feel like it’s starting to be diminishing returns with Bethesda after Fallout 3/Skyrim (though I’m sure someone will correct me with an older drop off point).
I think you've excellently captured the difference here. I didn't get heavily into Elite Dangerous, but on one of my longest journeys, I scanned a few things that no-one had ever scanned before. I didn't discover any awesome looking space phenomena that would be worth sharing (at least, none that hadn't been discovered before), but the prospect that I could was exciting.
Even just the idea that my name would be on other people's screens if they came and scanned the same things I did, because we were all sharing the same world.
If I remember it correctly, everything in E:D is procedurally generated, but every player has the same seed so it generates everything identically. That's how they keep the installation a manageable size.
Yes and this is what Starfield doesn't do. Starfield doesn't actually have whole planets generated by a shared seed. Planets in Starfield are just unlimited sources of randomly generated playboxes. Since the planets don't actually exist, they can't properly be said to be explorable.
For anyone interested in this topic, there is a super great video that explains the difference between procedural generation and random generation and how a tiny amount of data can be used to generate extremely complex things.