Yeah, your ship is basically a somewhat customizable base and the navigation computer is just a fast travel portal that moves your base, at least in the update I played a couple years ago.

I would consider those qol mods absolutely essential 😁

I was never too bothered by the landing animation ( or the multitude of loading screens for thag matter ) because I figured it's a limitation of their engine so they won't be able to fix it easily or at all - and besides other games have been getting away with it: Mass Effect, SW Outlaws etc.

What irks me about this is that a modder has been able to actually do it, without access to their engine and supposedly doing it in their spare time and for free. It really shows how lazy bethesda have become and frankly don't hold much hope for their future games.

What irks me about this is that a modder has been able to actually do it, without access to their engine and supposedly doing it in their spare time and for free.

Okay, that's actually amazing and crazy. Modders never stop amazing me. Bethesda still works on the game, so there must be technical reasons why they don't do it then. Maybe there are edge cases when this doesn't work well or has side effects. I can fully see why someone gets disappointed if this is actually possible.

That mod is crazy good, adds huge actual cities, completely new story, and makes combat terrifying because it turns up damage to realistic Star Wars levels. Two shots from a blaster pistol will put down anything unarmored, including you.

I really hate this reductionist attitude towards the game. I can promise you there are much more than 5 types of systems - there some 15 star classes, but then there are giants, sipergiants, you have planetoids, star orbiting othed stars, planets orbiting pulsars, moon-moons, sheperd moons, hot jupiters, gas giant pairs and many more variantions and that's just orbital mechanics, before you even get planetside or before you see the dozens of space anomalies. Stations, yes, are about 5 main types, but there are settlements, outposts, the odd science station and megaship, tourist outposts etc. The game offers a diversity in exploration that i've yet to see NMS match, despite it having landable earth likes and alien life. And Starfield somehow can't even match what's in NMS, despite todd bragging about exploration being the main focus.

Elite is a game about flying your spaceship in a space sandbox. If you like the flight model, the combat model, the symphony of sounds your ship makes you're gonna love doing whatever with it.

Now the game has plenty of flaws, and yes it is grindy ( or it used to be, as it's been lessend lf late ) but anything is grindy if you're just doing the same thing over and over. If you find you liked the game but got bored with it, maybe join a community, or join an outgoing expedition. Elite's community is unmatched in its awesomeness.

Apologies for the rant but I hate people besmirching the good name of Elite.

Yes, it's hyperbole. I didn't mean there are literally only 5.

These are my criticisms of the game I've played since the closed beta. Namely that it all feels the same. Yes, like I said in my other comment, there's inevitably repetition in any game, but Elite is very shallow compared to most other sandbox games I've played.

Star types exist, yes, but they're just floating orbs of fire with different colors. Stations and outposts etc exist, but you interact with them in the same way. What is there to interact with? How does it affect the system around it or the gameplay? Factions at war spawn conflict zones, but aside from those, there's very little to make you feel like a war is actually taking place. Exploration? I haven't done that in a long time, but at least before, it consisted of you jumping to a system, honking your system scan and then going to the next system. Engineering is "hey, let's play around with a random number generator", and then wasting a lot of resources you've managed to collect in various places over a not insignificant amount of time.

Yes, it's a sandbox and I don't mind repetition, but if after a week of playing you feel like you've seen pretty much everything there is to see, barring the things you need to grind for, I wouldn't consider it worth the entrance price.

If you consider that "besmirching" the game, then I would call you excessively defensive. It's just a game, and it doesn't need you to defend it.

Starfield is NOT a space flight sim. It’s a CRPG set up in a space traveling society, so it has… space travel.

The ‘flight model’ is absolutely arcade-ish and oriented to have fun while pew-pewing pirates or space jihadis, not to provide the player with a ‘sim’.

As a Flight of Nova player, I just saw death. Yes, this is extremely unrealistic, approaching a planet at that speed you'd just vaporize as soon as you hit the atmosphere. It looks like a tiny planet, though, which wouldn't have enough gravity for a thick atmosphere. Probably just scaled down, like Kerbin, which is smaller than Charon.

I wasn't defending as much as offering a different perspective on the game in case someone sleeps on it. I mean, you say "mile wide and inch deep" and it is like that sometimes ( stellar anomalies are drop in, gawk, scan, screenshot and leave ). But they also say it's "space trucking simulator", and it is that too sometimes. And that it's "just a wallpaper generator", and that's also true. But these add up. There's also the "emerging gameplay" which fdev kept yapping on about - things like the fuel rats, hull seals, the dssa and star carrier networks, axi etc.

I'm probabaly wrong thinking you haven't played in a whole but you might wanna give it another chance. In their defense, fdev corrected the engineering rng bullshit and added a feature to shorten tedious in-system travel. They also reworked powerplay and added some colonization features as well as some squadron activities and operations if you're on foot. On the other hand, some flaws persist: for one, it still does not respect your time, and it still does not explain much and requires third party tools and websites if you want to dive into anything.

Also I'm genuinely curious what other sandboxes ( preferably space ) offer what elite does. I know x4 does some things much better but the flight model, controls and ui is atrocious every time I play. There's also SpaceEngine, which kinda does what Elite does with exploration but with a lot less travel time and a lot less interactivity. I was rooting for Starfield for a while but the moment todd said "One. Thousand. Planets" I knew exploration would be shite. Any other recommendations?

this "bethesda depends on mods" thing completely falls flat when you point out how popular the games were on console long before mods were able to work on console

A) That was not seamless. There was an artificial cloud layer as the loading seam.

B) That was the least realistic entry I have ever seen in any media. How are you gonna go from orbit to the ground thrusting toward the ground (at a really steep angle too) the entire way down. You would be either be letting the atmosphere slow you down with friction or thrusting away from the planet the entire time to counter gravity.

C) How was it hovering flat to the ground midair with the only visible thrusters being in thw rear of the ship? Also those thrusters were still firing but the hovering ship wasn't moving forward.

For a game about space exploration, they give surprisingly few shits about even the semblance of realistic physics.

That's fair. And like I said, seamless landings and planetary travel are cool, but they don't make a game good on their own.

That said, I'd call it less an "excuse not to like the game" and more a tangible thing players can point to when the real problem is harder to put into words. For a lot of longtime Bethesda fans, imho, that problem is that Starfield failed to deliver the Bethesda-style "believable world."

Bethesda were never just the "see that mountain, climb it" developers. They were the "every object has a 3D model, every building has an interior, every town has a history, and not everything exists for the player" developers. That put them in a unique spot in the industry. That level of simulation let players believe in and explore their worlds in a way most games simply don't allow. It's why Bethesda games get such oddly specific critiques: where do the NPCs sleep, what do they eat, where do they go to the bathroom?

This doesn't matter to everyone, so I imagine a lot of these complaints sound trivial or even insane from the outside. But for the people it does matter to, Bethesda was one of the few developers filling that niche.

So when I see complaints about seamless travel, or shopkeepers not caring that you're standing behind their counter, or nobody reacting when you fire a gun in a crowd, or so many raider bases on an isolated planet with nobody to raid, I don't see an excuse to not like the game. I see players struggling to express their disappointment that the game feels artificial and gamified, and that it failed to capture the soul of a Bethesda game.

This is a mod.

In the original game, flight is limited to space and is very arcade-y. Press ‘W’ to activate thrusters and move forward.

KSP, Flight of Nova, Elite: Dangerous - there are plenty sims out there catering to those who want realism.

I think that forcing a completely realistic re-entry would be a bit much for most players, though it would be awesome for the option to be available to those who want a hardcore experience.

At the end of the day, most games are more enjoyable when you suspend disbelief. This is a game where people wear spacesuits in a vacuum, get shot multiple times with blood effects, and carry on fighting without experiencing violent depressurization.

That makes sense. Most people, especially so gamers, are not good at expression their concerns or even know why it is a problem to them. I actually meant my original comment about "excuse not to like the game", just expressed it wrongly myself. The irony right now.

I actually meant what you say, by people not knowing how to express some other issues, or not thinking about it (but being affected), the focus goes to more obvious and easy to point issues. And to some extend it is actually an excuse, because not having seemless landing I think wouldn't be a big deal if everyone had fun.

But maybe I'm wrong about this, because games and gamers evolve too. And for such simulation styled games going in and out of planets its a given to them to have a feature like seemless transitions. So when I say that I struggle how this is a game breaking issue to them to a point the refund or stop playing, or don't even buy it, it sounds too extreme. Especially players who didn't experience the game yet and never will just because of it.

Keep in mind that, as outlined in the title, this is a work in progress mod.

A) The unmodified game still has to load the game world during the transition. True seamless probably requires an engine overhaul beyond the scope of a mod, cloud cover to mask the loading of assets and make it feel seamless is a fair compromise.

B) I think that forcing a completely realistic re-entry would be a bit much for most players, though it would be awesome for the option to be available to those who want a hardcore experience.

KSP, Flight of Nova, Elite: Dangerous - there are plenty sims out there catering to those who want realism.

No Man’s Sky compromises on this to keep the game casual and fun.

C) In the original game, flight is limited to space and is very arcade-y. Press ‘W’ to activate thrusters and move forward. Vertical thrusters are present in the unmodified game and visible during landing cutscenes, so the modder may be able to tap into those animations as they continue work on the mod. I recall most of those thrusters being attached to the landing gear though.

At the end of the day, this is a game and most games are more enjoyable when you suspend disbelief. This is a game where people wear spacesuits in a vacuum, get shot multiple times with blood effects, and carry on fighting without experiencing violent depressurization.

I also haven't bought it, but have played it a few times via the high seas (and never finished). Two years post release was better, though mostly due to mods.

There's a Star Wars conversion underway across many mods. It added some life but didn't map precisely to the game (especially voice lines differing from the text). It's still going and may sway me to buy it for $20.

Too bad that game is an unstable mess. It could have been something good.

Not besmirching, but that game is nowhere near being too complicated to have stopped console support. I think it’s just lazy development. The same reason why there’s close to no story or quests in it.

It’s just an empty sandbox. A fun one. But empty nonetheless.

Not really, Bethesda games are mainly PC games so the market for console is always gonna be smaller. Their console versions are always inferior, lacking updates or even just the amount of polish compared to their PC counterparts. I played some of my favourite Bethesda games on console first and I can attest that console players have always been sort of second-class citizens in terms of priority.

I think Bethesda hands console players a shittier deal and most people just have to put up with that because even in the times we live in now a console is still cheaper in up-front costs than a PC capable of performing the same games at the same level.

Yeah, I know it isn't But even you must admit, our genre is dry as a desert. We take what we can get, even if it's not exactly a flight sim it can be close enough to scratch the itch.

no i dont think so, i prefer a vanilla experience and i know most console players agree. betheda game are definitely cream of the crop of modded experiences but thats not all that they are. vanilla experience is still top tier

I'll have to give flight of nova a try. Looks like a fun game!

That's Star Citizen

Are you mixing up Starfield with Star Citizen? Starfield is already out, it was just kinda mediocre.

It's a shitty game that makes no sense.

It looks like this is a baked animation though. There's no reason it couldn't be more realistic. The biggest issue though would be time. This is already much longer than the vanilla experience. Doing it "properly" would extend it to probably minutes. Minutes every time watching a baked animation would get old fast.

Oh, it's great, highly recommended. Scratches an itch that Elite Dangerous couldn't. I'll warn you that at the moment, there's only fast forward when docked, so you'll need some patience for longer trips, plan accordingly. The main planet is actually the size of Earth, and a full orbit takes about 90 minutes. Always plenty of short to medium range missions to warm up, though. The two moons they just added are much closer than Earth's Moon so at least transfers are less of a wait than they could have been. Eventually we're going to get interplanetary (there are other planets but they're unfinished and not intended to be visited yet) and probably in-flight fast forward, looking forward to those.

well there is a reason why scifi and fantasy books are usually lumped together in book stores.

Yeah, the artificial cloud transition was a bit more obvious when the terrain changed drastically from a yellowish color to a snowy white.