There are enough that it feels like a lot. It feels like there is an almost (but not quite) overwhelming amount of things to see and do in the galaxy. They seemed to have found a sweet spot, where there is more stuff than I can bother to browse through, but not so much that I feel intimidated about it.
I have at this point played quite a bit. I have really gotten into it and it has somewhat monopolized my game time the past week. And I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.
I think it works like this:
Each planet has between zero and three or four points of interest when you scan it from orbit. Those spots are there for specific quests or whatever. But once you land on a planet, there are little outposts and other features every thousand meters or so - I think those are procedurally generated when you land.
The planets are all massive but, like No Man’s Sky, there’s no compelling reason to just wander around one unless you’re looking for a perfect spot for a base.
But it is kind of open-world, in that every planet you can land on is wide-open for exploration, with random environments around you, and hidden places to discover.
I haven’t done it yet, but I’m planning on just walking all the way around a smaller moon at some point. It should be possible, if I have the patience.
I don’t know, but I encourage the experiment.
My hesitation comes from my experience trying to find an ideal outpost spot. Based on reported success by a couple others, I scanned the planet (a moon, in fact) and turned on show resources, and landed as precisely as I could at the border between two minerals.
It wasn’t successful for me, despite trying it a half dozen times, finding only one of the ores despite walking several kilometers in the alternate ore’s direction.
My point being: after a couple Km walking in a direction, I didn’t get the sense I had traveled far at all in the circumference of the moon. I’m wondering if they create an “instance” of your landing area, and it seems virtually unlimited, but the distance you travel isn’t directly related to the planet surface. PROBABLY NOT, because then how would it reconcile the POIs you find on a planet-level view.
No. The maps for the planets are all completely pre-generated (so we should all have the same general landscape because it was procedurally generated once, creating the shape of the land). Into this are placed the interest points. So the entire surface of the planet is modeled as one coherent body that could theoretically be explored in full.
The reason it feels like you haven’t made progress compared to the circumference of the moon is that you really hadn’t.
One of the smallest landable moons in Sol is Mimas, with a circumference of around 1,245 kilometers. That means that each 8km×8km chunk is around half a percent of the way around the moon. And this is for one of the smallest planetary bodies in the game.
That’s why I don’t really understand the requests for freely moving between instances. For what? Even if they were to add vehicles - do you really want to drive around on the surface for hours or days?
I do believe that if you gain sufficient elevation you can see the curvature of the planet (I think I saw it from the top of a tower in New Atlantis) althoigh I guess that could somehow be due to draw distance?
I see. I’m not a big fan of using random-ish encounters as filler (I’m looking at you, Mass Effect: Andromeda).
Did you like the Fallout or Elder Scrolls games? That’s what the random encounters are like.
I am and I can’t wait. I am hearing from some fans of Bethesda in general that this one isn’t one of their best(I guess Skyrim is probably their best), but I still would happily accept a pretty good Bethesda game. I liked Fallout 4 and some folks were, in my opinion, overly disappointed.
I’m also glad about silent protagonist. I’m hoping this gives more freedom to dialogue options.
From the research I’ve done each place you land is roughly a 4x4 or 5x5km square, something like that. If you reach the edge of a cell (which I’ve never done) the game tells you to take off and land somewhere else to continue exploring. From a YouTube video I saw, when you’re looking at the map even all the way zoomed in, each pixel is a different procedurally generated map.
There are flora/fauna/features/POIs scattered around. But I believe they are randomly/procedurally placed. It’s not like you will encounter roads between installations or anything like that, the POIs are evenly spaced out. That’s why to me it isn’t really a conventional seamless open world, yeah you can pick the spot you want to cutscene to on/around planets, but there is no equivalent of like walking from Whiterun to Morthal in Skyrim and encountering handcrafted unique content all along the way.
Starfield is huge with tons of content and tons to do, but there are also many barriers to seamless open world exploration.
If you’re saying the random encounters are unique and flavourful like “The Republic of Dave” in Fallout 3 or the various daedric sidequests in Skyrim, then that’s a good sign! But I’m more used to random encounters like “you encounter 2d6 generic bandits living in generic house style #3B guarding a safe full of generic treasure”.
I wouldn’t put too much stock in the discourse.
I really liked Oblivion as a kid, and Skyrim was one of the first games I’d been looking forward to before release - I think Spore was probably the very first game I’d heard about before release and was waiting for, with Skyrim being the first one that wasn’t a massive disappointment 
At the time I remember that the consensus among TES players being that Morrowind was much better than Oblivion. When Skyrim came out, people generally ranked it slightly above Oblivion but disappointingly below Oblivion.
I loved Skyrim and played it a bunch, but eventually moved on to other games. Starfield gave me that itch though and I’ve been putting together a modlist to go back to Skyrim eventually.
While doing so I saw that nowadays most people consider Skyrim a smashing masterpiece, Oblivion pretty good, and Morrowind seems all but forgotten?
Strange how things change…
Those are not random encounters. Those are quests, that can be found at a given location in every play through. Those do exist throughout the galaxy - for example, last time I played I came to a system where four different settler groups had landed on different planets and moons. They were all beset by Spacers, who took down their communication satellites. We help the settlers regain comms, then help them put aside their feuds to deal with the Spacers.
There are lots of sidequests that are equivalent to daedric shrine quests and similar.
There are also random encounters, akin to meeting M’aiq the Liar or a Thalmor patrol or a giant herding mammoths down the path or a bear or any of the other things you can run into in Skyrim. And like prior titles - some of these random encounters are conversations (M’aiq, and the pilot with his daughter selling lemonade) or fights (bear on the road vs alien creatures on the surface) or either (Thalmor patrol vs landed ship).
If I had to describe it in the most Skyrim/Fallout terms I can…
Flying in space, whether from one world to another or between systems, is like taking the roads between settlements. You’ll get random encounters, see cool things in the distance that make you want to detour (ooh, a ringed gas giant with 4 moons!), etc. You can do a lot of fast travelling if you choose to which bypasses much of this journey; but just like how you don’t have to fast travel in Skyrim, you can head back go civilization one star system at a time rather than fast travelling straight to a landing pad if that’s what you choose to do.
When you land on a planet in order to visit a specific site, be that a city or a dungeon - you’ve now gotten off the main road and onto a sidepath. You’re generally not too far from your goal, but also not very far from it - think the fork in the road where the path leading to the mine’s entrance starts, or the stables outside the city wall. From here, you can head right where you’re going - or you can check out one of the nearby points of interest. Caves, abandoned or occupied buildings, other natural features - these POIs could be anything.
Entering a city or dungeon is just lile it is in prior BGS games. You can freely leave any city to head to nearby POIs on foot, too.
The POIs are pseudo-random. Most of them are hand-crafted, just like dungeons in FO4 or Skyrim, and there are apparently about twice as many of them as there were in FO4. Some are specifically placed for story missions (so there will always be a mine walking distance from the Martian city, for example) but the exact placement is random. Others can spawn anywhere thay meets their requirement - so a POI may only spawn on inhabitted planets with native wildlife, or only on uninhabited planets with an atmosphere, etc…
You seem to be suggesting you can fly between planets or star systems in real time, but that’s not the case unless I’m missing something big. You have to go to the map, select where you want to go, watch a short cutscene, and you’re at your destination planet. That’s when the random encounters can happen.
Someone tried actually flying towards another planet in real time, at the ~200m/s or so speed it took many hours and when they got to the planet it was a low-res 2d model.
Starfield is a very good game, it’s just that space is not a big seamless open world. There is tons of content but it’s broken up by cutscene walls. Imagine the entire game was like Washington DC in Fallout 3, you can’t get from point (planet) A to point (planet) B without going through cutscene portals.
The art is great, the storylines are great, lots to see and do and collect.
You can also click the select key while looking at a planet in your spaceship to highlight it, then press X to travel there. There’s a loading screen, but then again, there are loading screens when you move between planetary orbits in NMS or ED too, those loading screens are just disguised as minigames (ED) or pretty lights (NMS).
It was Alanah Pearce:
The first time you play Skyrim/Fallout, there’s a sense of potential that you get when you strike out across the map. Fallout 3 and 4 are particularly good at creating it with the vistas you see when you leave the vaults for the first time. There’s this big open space and you can just walk into it and find stuff to do. Every horizon has cool stuff over it and the map is almost like an NPC you interact with and learn about. It’s rad (heh), even if you eventually stop walking and start fast traveling.
Starfield doesn’t have that, but I genuinely don’t see how it could. There’s nothing to explore in 99.99999 percent of space. It could have shoved all of its content into one or two planets in a single solar system, I guess, and then you could do walking and exploring types of stuff. But it wouldn’t be the same game.
That difference in scope, and the sacrifice of exploration in favor of creating scale, is the biggest difference between the games. The dungeons, NPCs, quest structures, gunplay, and plenty else are almost identical to Fallout. Starfield doesn’t let you walk from one place to the next, but the places themselves are standard Bethesda in every way.
I saw this and it is interesting, though clearly not what the game wanted you to do.
I seem to remember things go white or something when you are entering atmosphere in NMS, it’s pretty seamless but a loading animation nonetheless.
But in Elite Dangerous you are in control from space all the way down. Watch this video, he switches to an external camera to take a screenshot at one point, but that was a deliberate choice, he is in control of the ship in real time. This is how I was hoping solar system travel and planet landings would be handled in Starfield: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJBKVaYXmE4
Even with 1 or 2 planets, we’d either need loading screens between areas, one area that actually has things in it and a relatively empty and procedural rest of the map, or a game where getting from one quest to the next requires a 6 hour drive in a ground vehicle. Unless you massively scaled down the planets, Kerbal Space Program style (only an order of magnitude smaller).