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Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design - but that’s not boring, Bethesda insists
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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Starfield
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It's true, some of them ARE empty by design...but the problem is, a world with life on it in Starfield is barely more interesting than the barren rock. It is still almost ALL randomly generated, there just happens to be more wildlife to scan while you run across the boring landscape, and maybe an animal will try to kill you.
Oh, and the pointless radiant quest you get will be from a solar farm on the nice planet, instead of a mining platform on the barren one. There is very little difference.
I do not understand Bethesda's insistence on "Radiant" quests.
I don't necessarily mind them, but they seem to be out of control in this one. I ran from the UC place in Atlantis to my ship, landed on Mars, ran into the town to a quest giver, and when I opened my map next, I had dots ALL OVER IT.
I popped open my quest log, and there were 11 random quests I didn't even realize I had hoovered up just running from location to location. The thing that kind of bothers me about it is that that's more than double the amount of quests I had intentionally picked up.
It's okay if I explore and uncover some of these myself, Todd.
A lot of those come from you "overhearing" NPCs talk. But often you're completely out of range, or there's so many NPCs brabbling that you can't make anything out anyway and suddenly the questlog fills up with "talk to so and so" quests, with no relation of its context (which imo is the real crime here).
That's not what radiant quests are tho
Radiant quests are just finding 3 slurm-slushes for the NPC, and they are in 1 of 5 predefined locations, and the reward is either 25 gold or 75 xp.
The next quest is a quest to kill a randomly generated NPC, also in 1 of the same predefined 5 locations, for 34 gold or 99xp.
It's just a few objects getting called in a class in order to keep things "fresh". But I'd argue that it's bad game design in order to make the world feel more alive. Deep Rock Galactic took the AI director from L4D2, the randomness of minecraft and its materials, and the classes of TF2, and took radiant quests to their ultimate conclusion. And it's great.
Which is how the mission boards in Starfield work, the random ones you get from NPCs talking around you are almost always more in-depth then that from my almost 40 hours in Starfield thus far.
I'm very aware of what a radiant quest is as I've put thousands of hours into Bethesda games and they've done a much better job with Starfield in my experience thus far.
Additionally, comparing Starfield to L4D or Deep Rock Galactic simply doesn't make sense. I've played both (L4D quite a bit more out of the two) and you literally can't compare the gameplay objective between those and Starfield or beth games in general
"HYUCK! BUY SLURM-SLUSH! GET 5 FOR 3, A LIMITED TIME ONLY!"
Objective added: Buy Slurm-Slush.
I feel like they should just put the "Things you overheard" objectives in a different tab. Problem solved.
Radiant quests aren't bad as long as we know that's what's happening. We don't want to keep on down a path if it's not going to lead somewhere but they are useful for earning credits or xp on occasion.
Ugh, they are bringing back radiant quests? Did they learn nothing from Skyrim? Bare minimum, radiant quests have to be BETTER than Deep Rock Galactic missions. But better to just not have them at all, a la Baldur's Gate 3.
Hey thanks to radiant quests I now know that there is "wildlife" on Luna. Isn't that awesome?!
It doesn't matter if you are on Jemison right next to New Atlantis, the capital of the universe, or on some random moon in nowhere, you'll get the same abandoned buildings with spacers/pirates/mercenaries in them. And literally zero of them will have any sort of story or writing attached to them. Walking around on random planets is unbelievably repetitive.