You don't realize just how dead Starfields cities feel until you notice that NPCs don't enter shops or go back to their homes, shopkeepers work 24/7 and never sleep. They completely removed radiant AI. As basic as it was, it still managed to make Skyrim cities feel more alive and not just like you're surrounded by background characters in a bad sitcom.
I mean, Starfield is a space age sci fi game, with spaceships coming and going at all hours, realistically shops would be open 24/7, with npcs at most rotating between 8 hours shifts. If anything, Bethesda cities are still too small, Night city in Cyberpunk 2077 is a good example of how big a proper sci fi city would be, and in a city with millions of people living together, the Radiant AI is just not going to work.
@pauloroberto4693 yea but in cyberpunk the city is a majority of the whole game map, for a game Luke skyrim or starfield for that matter that is simply not feasible, also even large modern cities can have recurring characters. I'd argue the main way to go about this whole scale thing is to split the city into districts and simply not make every district accessible, this makes you able to work with a more reasonable scale and opens up possibilities for future expansions
simple solution; have it be two or three shopkeepers who work in rotas, that way you get the immersion while also not having to spend time waiting just for the shops to be open
@@vinniciusrosa8284 yeah, but that doesn't work because it only feels populated if we are able to immerse ourselves into the belief that those NPCs are people, and it's a lot harder to do that to some generic randomly generated NPC than it is to do it with an actual character with backstory and purpose.
I'd rather a city actually feel like a city. 50 npcs in what's supposed to be a capital city would not be immersive at all. And making every npc in a CITY have a family and history is not feasible. And how is it more immersive to know who you're stealing from? The average thief isn't going to know the entire family of a person they're stealing from. They aren't gonna know them by name Knowing every single person by name in a city is not immersive
Starfield cities might be big, but they seem fake for some strange reason. Also all Starfield cities feel like they are put in the middle of nowhere... if they were settled long ago there would have been smaller settlements around, cities are never alone. Starfield cities feel more like spaceships, but without the space... there is no reason why smaller settlements would not exist... also nobody would let dangerous wildlife just to roam around the city like it does, in a realistic scenario.
@@Slav4o911Realistically in an interstellar society, even "small towns" would be so large that you wouldn't able to see the edge of the town on the horizon from city central. You're right. Starfield "cities" feel like medieval forts made of plastic that got dropped down in random locations. They could've just made it so you can only explore a portion of the city and left the rest OOB. That alone would've done wonders for immersion.
Developers need to shift their thinking from bigger maps to denser maps. I’d rather have a map that’s 10 times smaller, but every area is packed with detail, more lively npc’s, every building is explorable and actually serves a purpose
Depends on the game, I think for a space exploration game how starfield did it works. Maybe they could have made each map a bit denser so there is less travel time between POIs but spread out large maps fit this style of game imo.
I'd prefer they do make the bigger maps and add more to them. One of the long time Skyrim vloggers had looked into the teams that developed Starfield and he said there was only 1 writer for Starfield, and it shows. Then we have one of the devs say that several small studios made different pieces of the game and none of them interacted. They all worked in a vacuum. That would explain poor story lines and disjointedness...at least to those who play slower. If you race through the game paying little attention to detail you will likely miss most of that.
Id be so happy with a game with a Skyrim or oblivion sized map, that was just truly busy, with things to do in every nook and cranny. Thats the main issue i hold with the newer fallout titles, 4 and 76 have such massive game maps that sometimes they feel incredibly barren and empty (in a bad game design way and not the post apocalyptic way), starfield takes it to a whole different level with how empty it can feel
In space sure. But the hub areas, the cities themselves feel incredibly empty. You don't necessarily need to have ALL cities be packed with npcs all with their own schedules and so on, but starfield is almost completely empty of it and lacks any form of immersion, imo.
so does starfeild . new atlantis shows us originally the developement and culture of the uc which is the superpower in its galaxy . as time passes and we get to learn about vae victus and us shady shit we are introduced to the well and cydonia ( which is a safe haven for everything illegal including piracy ) this shows us for the culture uc has it is built on shoody ground and shows the dark underbelly of the uc . which is much different from the lock spaceship which is a pirate controlled anarachy area . which is much different from the genderdyne run neon city so each Handcrafted major area in starfeild is unique and with purpose hell even side content cities like the planet of caiopia and the place where the ship crashed shows us how the crew manged to survive before dying and how the child of the dead crew survives .
Its also canon that the cities and population are larger than what you the player are seeing. So the entire time you can if you want, enjoy the concept that everything is scaled down in order for you to experence the game.
@@808lukas1 how so ? both skyrim and starfeild have cities with named npc and lore and areas which makes sense . yet ur telling me that skyrim feels real because its skyrim ? thats a childish claim that isnt supported by data much less supported by ur own argument comment when u are actually mood for a discussion
The part where the city becomes the wilderness always made so much sense in Skyrim. It’s not just the gate but signs of settlement leading up to it. Like the horse stables or patrols.
Starfield has none of that. Its like a Massivly Hard border between "Settlement" and "Wilderness" and its like only several feet between the two. Which makes them standout incredibly because there is Nothing around the settlements, just vast wilderness almost literally in front of your doorstep. none of the supplemental things necessary to run a city or even roads. I get that its a space game but Not Everyone flys a ship and your ship cant get you literally anywhere. Your not going to be landing on top of a tree canopy and it would be a huge waste of resources to use a space capable vessel for exclusive in-atmospheric transport
Sometimes I larp as an NPC in Skyrim as a older save, since I accomplished everything. Going through my daily stroll around the city in the morning, eating at the tavern, going to the Jarl and complain, go back to the tavern and drink a lot of mead, punch the hold guards, get imprisoned, return home the next day and sleep. Ah. Truly the best days.
The one thing that really fucks me off about the dialogue around starfield is that no one talks about the biggest problems with the game, the tone, aesthetics and world building. Fallout has identity, Elder Scrolls has IDENTITY, Starfield is void of any kind of interesting identity and world building. The UC and FC are cookie cutter factions, their history is uninspiring, and 3/4 of the faction quest lines have virtually nothing to say about the ideology that drives them.
This is what we get because of the prevalence of tabloid-styled 'journalism' and outrage media in gaming RUclips (prolly other sites too, idk don't really use much). Genuinely substantial criticism gets buried underneath the noise of 'outdated engine', 'fire Emil Pagliarulo', etc. Of course I'm just cherry-picking the bad complaints, but the parroting gets tiring after a while. Also, thanks. I think you nailed the reason why I just can't be interested in Starfield.
Starfield feels a lot like Arena. Which is a weird thing to say, but it feels like it's the start of a new series and could be something really interesting the way Daggerfall is the real start of the Elder Scrolls series.
That's something I feel like is overlooked too, it's all extremely safe. There's nothing that challenges you and so nothing interesting. Think about what people thought and how society was organized in 1720. That's how far in the future this game is set. And yet it's still just the same old same old.
The game is designed to be politically correct and absolutely safe in all aspects. That includes the generic 'NASA' style , to how the NPC look, sound, and act. And how the story progresses and what the player can do. It's pretty obvious why they did this, if you know you know.
I blinked and the videogames industry got so disappointing that people are suddenly praising Skyrim’s cities. Edit: replies and other comments indicate that they’d prefer to have ~50 fleshed out NPCs over thousands of faceless ones. This is a false dichotomy. Not only that, but it also applies to Skyrim. There are significantly more generic NPCs than there are named ones in the game. Whiterun has 78 citizens and 38 guards.
I was just as confused. Skyrim? The game with villages smaller than many Hamlets?? But I still rather take those 10-20 people over 2000 NPCs that phase in and out of existence.
To be honest, skyrim counter-culture got WAY too bad recently Yes, bethesda has fallen, yes, skyrim re-releases are a scam, yes, the creation club is a travesty But at its core, Skyrim was one of the most beloved and influential games of all time, and it deserves that title, and it deserves praise, as much as people nowadays seem to love to bring up its many flaws and shortcomings.
Part of the problem is the lack of filler OUTSIDE of the city. There are usually a small amount of infrastructure surronding it, but ultimately, these cities simply exist in a void, no one ever apparently leaves the city borders. No roads, no houses outside, not even any abandoned buildings. They can SORTA maintain the illusion while you're in the city, but the second you leave, the man behind the curtain is revealed.
Do you realise how many people you need to make a city? And time? In a space game? This aint supposed to be a 120 exabyte game, only 120gb + mods. And local NPCs are sometimes found far away from their New Atlantis.
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo GTA 3 did a much larger city with a team of 23 people using super primitive tools on less than 1gb of hard drive space. Some outskirts would not require new textures or NPC's and mostly pre-existing assets could be used. Remember, Starfield had 500+ very talented people working on it. As it is look outwards from any city in Starfield and you'll see open country.
@@Lancasterlaw1175 and while New Vegas is still insanely condensed at least in that Fallout game there are ruined suburbs and industrial parks outside of the city core that gradually thin out to wilderness.
Hell, even Night City, a city whose whole lore basically makes it a super dense, tiny city surrounded by an uninhabited wasteland, still has the urbanization cutoff into more suburban areas and eventually rural plots and ghost towns and farms (though, again, the cutoff from urban to wasteland being so sharp in 77 is kind of the point)
Classic case of “bigger doesn’t mean better.” Walking past 100 nameless npcs is so much worse than walking through white run and hearing the ACTUAL characters go about their daily lives. Also no matter how small almost every character in Skyrim tries to have a small quest attached to them that provides history and lore about them or the town.
You do realise, you too can spend $2 billion like rockstar just creating 1000 individually voiced npc characters today in starfield yourself with the creation kit. Or you can do it for just the cost of creation kit and your own voice.
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo They didn't even have to be voiced, but having a Random Name Generator so each of those citizens has a semi-unique name, can go a very long way even if they do nothing but procedurally walk around. Random Citizen #5341 is significantly less impactful, than Bob Bobington the Third, even if you never see Bob again.
@@Triaxx2 it's a space game that has to be both technically better and better looking than Fallout 4, fitting on 120GB sized disk, but of course the disc version only could pack 47GB, the rest had to be download. Today it already has the random named npcs mod where npcs can have 9 billion different names. Or where you yourself can follow creation kit guides on youtube by 510Deshawn or Jramosworks, and make your own unique named voiced follower hireable npcs. And there are mods where you can make any npc human robot animal a follower. Not to mention mods & creations where you can make upto 9 billion outposts (up from the 8-24 in vanilla), have different varieties to points of interest, increased number of pois on a map, denser forests, new quests, quests you can make, I even saw a spooky Gate 11 styled quest that SistaCitizen was live streaming. All these additions easily made with a tiny change in the ini files or easily makeable with the creation kit. Someones even already made a VR mod. But these additions can fill up your 1tb storage as much as you like. They really didnt need to be in the base game. Bethesda could have easily made the game without the blue checkmarker and made the game like old school runescape without runelite. But today, people use runelite so that they can finish quests and get those end game items, which for starfield, ship parts are level capped as are the variation of pois. Bethesda wanted you to play the game based upon the gameplay mechanic lore they were setting. You can rip up that lore and make andreja bald, sarah a brunette and cora a snail 🐌 like alien, unalice essential npcs and cancel their quest lines today with current mods. They ain't going to be on that 47gb bluray disk, but you can download them after you downloaded the 55+GB. As for citizen names, how many videos have you seen of citizens complaining to cops about being identified and asked for their name.
A cursory google search suggests that the major cities of Starfield are handcrafted, and that the planets aren't randomised when playing. This means that Starfield's major cities are as procedurally generated as the Elder Scrolls games.
There's only a giant waterfall and a lake in New Atlantis, and what nerd has ever heard of underwater springs? Easier to bitch when 50% of new players haven't even finished the first mission.
The thing is... it's not generated by AI, it's generated by the most simple number generator... nothing fancy. If it was generated by AI it would not have been that boring.
The size is still way too small though- it's the literal capital of all of humanity for the last 170 years, but look in almost any direction but inwards and you'll see countryside. Compare it to say the city of GTA 3 (develped by 23 people) and you'll see that not only the size tiny but also the NPC's are loads less responsive.
@@Lancasterlaw1175But GTA, just like Cyberpunk, is entirely built around that single settlement. In Bethesda's games, cities mostly act as hubs to plan or prepare adventures elsewhere. It doesn't justify the poor AI and weak ambience, but still, it needs to be considered.
I probably would use the word "believable" instead of "realistic". NPCs going to work, coming home, and sleeping at night is believable. And I think 24hr shops in Starfield could be too, if they just had the NPCs trade places with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd shift workers.
@@bestliutr I can see having a person there just for make it not feel like a vending machine, although I'd still automate it if sales didn't justify three shifts of workers, so night would be covered.
Even at their rather small scale, each city of Skyrim is still worth exploring. Every nook and cranny has something to see, do, or play around with. Every "city" of Starfield is just a nesting doll of containers within containers with arbitrary loot and no drive to explore for niche things.
12:42 Saarthal was the first city built in Skyrim after the arrival of Nords from Atmora sometime in the middle of the Merethic Era. Saarthal was also the first capital of Nord civilization in Tamriel, as well as the largest of the ancient Nordic cities
I think Labyrinthion the biggest ancient city and capital. Saarthal is the oldest and 1st one but fell to the Falmer/snow elves in the Night of Tears. This lead to the return of Ysgramor with his 2 sons (these 3 being supposedly the only survivors) and the 500 Companions
@@krasmazov8 yes, but still in the Merethic Era and I think we have no years about when all this happened exactly so I'm not sure how much later it was built. Also my pushback is on the part where the original comment says Saarthal was the largest ancient city
Survival is incredibly satisfying, with the carriages and ferry overhaul mod in place of fast travel. Use a portable camping kit for when you are too far from a boat/carriage and there's a cave nearby. You get a real feeling for distance instead of teleporting everywhere. Anything in the north, up towards Volkihar can be pretty rough if you're not prepared (blizzards, nighttime etc.). It can be a good idea to also get mods that remove the compass, map and quest markers so you navigate based off landmarks.
@@adrianscorch It's a Collection on Nexusmods that makes the game much harder. You need to eat, sleep and equip yourself against the cold. Monsters don't level with you. Adds many new weapons, armor and spells and new lands. Also adds backpacks and tents and the ability to craft a fireplace anywhere in the wilderness. The start is different depending on which race/class you choose. Also adds many graphical improvements, it looks like a new game. You do need a powerful PC though.
There is literally a moat between Akila’s spaceport and city. The only way to access the city from the spaceport is via a bridge over this moat. Perfect place for a river. It’s like they started to create an area that makes sense and then just stopped. This relatively minor issue is like a microcosm of everything that is wrong with Starfield: the beginnings of ideas that never get properly developed.
@@geekypleer1202 it's just the music. That and a river in skyrim, with butterflies, and someones left behind caught fish smoking away. Which would be nonsense in a space game. A space game is all about terrain, emptiness, zero g, technology, escape, science, industrial accidents, people interaction, rocks, ruins, earth history lore, nasa, rockets, lasers. There's literally no life on mars. No rivers.
They aren't that realistic, but they are relatively immersive if you ignore the tiny size and the way the NPCs repeat the same dialogue too much. (seriously, why do they have several voices for guards, but they all use the same dialogue even for the fluff lines?) Their defenses especially tend to be for show, and ineffective if you look at them closely, with features being the wrong size, lacking access to spots defenders would need to shoot from, and even some just having a hole where a gate should be.
It's sadly obvious why Akila is where it is. The devs just needed a place for the city and they saw that there is free space. This place was as good as any other, so they just put it there.
Starfield had a huge lack of "why?" Nothing clear to explain how all of humanity is down to a few hundred thousand people. No one took two seconds to ask " why should this make sense?"
That's the thing. Nothing about Starfield's setting and world building seems credible or makes much sense. It just doesn't work on a fundamental conceptual level. No heart, no soul, no character. No IDENTITY!
There is actually two separate reasons. The first is the colony wars, between the UC and the Freestar, which is where the mechs and bio weapons come from. The second for spoiler reasons for those who might care, is down here and it's because of the gravity drive testing that turned earth into an uninhabitable desert world which is something you discover later as you progress the main story.
@Triaxx2 Its odd survivors would not have a lot of iconography of Earth. I understand it's a huge undertaking fot devs to try and account for what would make it the most realistic. Still, each of these populations to lose their identity of all Earth cultures just seems very strange. I've kind of concluded that it's partly due to being an alternate universe so the symbolism could be everywhere it's just not familiar to my eyes because it's a different Earth.
@Triaxx2 I also don't understand anything about the reasoning there would have been a colony war. Let's say it's resources or something then you follow with another question of why. And you keep asking why until you've worked out all the different details but that didn't seem to be done. It's a very superficial factional divide. It feels a great deal like outer worlds with just this incredibly shallow set of implications but you look into it even a little bit and it just fizzes away into meaninglessness. Sure there could be some sort of tiny bit of wardrop but that's the opposite of it being saturated with motivations. People all over the place constantly from the start of the game to the end of the game should be articulating their feelings about the reason for their organization. I don't know if it's because some developers live in a information bubble and exist amongst very shallow people, but everywhere else there's a large amount of discussion about the particulars of beliefs
They did a FANTASTIC job of making the entire province of Skyrim believable. It is one of the few video game worlds that trick my brain into thinking it could be or is a real place. Sure the cities are scaled down due to hardware limitations and the scale is 1:10 of what lore-accurate Skyrim is (also due to hardware limitations) but they more than made up for both of those by making what is there believable and realistic. It doesn't feel like a gam pretending to be real life. Too many games you can see behind the curtain so to speak, things don't add up, locations become uncanny valleys of "this sorta looks like a town, but my brain is telling me otherwise". The first-person POV of Skyrim also helps with immersion. I think they just got too ambitious and let the scale get beyond their means in Starfield. So we're left with an ocean 10000 miles across and 2mm deep. :(
Haelgas bunkhouse is one of my favorite filler buildings. It has nods to every character that lives there, its communal and offers random npcs a sense of self importance and community.
Imagine if you had to deal with some sort of water barons extorting the people, then the lack of a water source turns from a overlooked mishap to a functioning plot device to either further the player being good or evil in their playthrough
They can't show that to a corporate board meeting... can you imagine how the suits would react to that... Though you gave a simple idea which would make the game immediately interesting, just because something will actually be happening. In Starfield nothing happens, and even if something happens people react like they are "not from this world".... I mean they don't care.... Starfield characters seem to be completely uninterested in what happens around them.
@@Slav4o911 to be fair people not caring about the world around them is very accurate to the real world today in many respects. But that is due to modern pscyhology and mind control tactics used to produce a docile nihilistic idiocracy by design. Which one could argue perhaps is the starfield future?
@SecretlySeven Idk but it's almost the same thing and I'd still not say they're believable cuz the biggest city and capital doesn't even have 100 people.
@@aysseralwan That's scale. Solitude was the upper limit of what the engine could do in 2011. Remember what consoles the kids had in 2011. That is what determines the size of open world cities in games.
@SecretlySeven yeah, I understand that there are engine limitations but these limitations make it for me impossible to say any Elder Scrolls city is believable or realistic. I mean they can be immersive in a way but not as cities.
I just started another modded play through of Skyrim. Even after all these years it still holds up so well, especially with the help of some quality of life mods. Every place you go to makes sense, nothing feels like it there “just because”. Starfield on the other hand just doesn’t make sense in almost any way. I tried so hard to like it but the repetition killed me. I played for the dlc and never played it and never even came close to finishing the main campaign.
Skyrims cities are small because engine limitations but it’s also pretty historically accurate, the Nords are clearly based on the Scandinavian cultures and throughout history Scandinavia had rarely ever had large population centers. Even large cities like Stockholm were much smaller population wise compared to the rest of European cities.
Scandinavia is not in Tamriel. Small population centers doesnt mean 10-20 people being the population of a whole region. Skyrim cities are small because Bethesda is shit at creating cities or most other things involving game development.
It’s not engine limitations, but just Bethesda using their radiant AI where NPCs all have set schedulers…doing this for 100s of NPCs would be a nightmare
Skyrim cities don't look anything like actual medieval Scandinavian cities nor did any proper city ever have a population of twelve, even the average village of the period would have had more people than all of Solitude. I love Skyrims cities but trying to say they are realistic in any regard is silly.
The first time you step into Whiterun will be a moment where you feel shivers. The sight of a lived-in civilisation just feels so good when there's people like the Battle-Born brothers and Eorlund Grey-Mane roaming and working away at their forges and competing for the title of best blacksmith, it just feels *alive.*
3:00 If there were wells, or some sort of technology showcased in the city that told us an immersive way these places accumulate water that would have been helpful to understand why people even live there. Take Star Wars for instance, in A New Hope, Luke's family were literally moisture farmers, a valuable resource of a barren desert world like Tatooine and it's an obvious profession, they used moisture collecting technology and machines to harvest water vapor. It's literally one of the first world building elements in the entire franchise. And Bethesda couldn't be bothered to explain Akila City and how it even sustains itself in such a basic way.
Love the critique. Starfield's cities give off theme park vibes, where everything is just there for the player on a surface level, while not actually functioning as cities. The shops don't close, there are no entertainment options, and there's a dearth of memorable people to interact with.
Ok i will say that there is a reason Solomon Coe set up Akila city there During the main storyline with Sam Coe When you are looking for the artifact he explicitly States that his grandfather Solomon Coe set up akila city where it is because it was a dead zone of energy (because of the artifact) and so it was hard for the UC to spot them and also a lot of the dangerous animals didn't want to go near that place, so it was safer than other spots
I will acknowledge this comment because it does answer a question in the video, but the issue here is that it adds more questions than answers. For example, why was the dead zone seemingly more important than immediate access to a basic human need? Wouldn't a dead zone also be cause for the UC to be more curious about an area and investigate it for themselves? And if the nearby artifact was supposedly keeping the wildlife away, why did the city have to have a wall in the first place? It's just bad worldbuilding, but thanks for leaving a good comment
@@Acex2ron hang on, now you mention that, is this a bit of a plot hole? Because the dead zone scares off animals, and it's created by the artifact, wouldn't removing the artifact remove the dead zone? And doing so wouldn't let the wildlife roam back into the area? Actually would make a good plot point about how your quest accidentally causes a disaster that you might need to resolve, but Bethesda seemed to forgot about the point they raised 5 minutes earlier. Also in all that time, no one ever actually found the source of the disturbance, despite having a map to it, and it sitting in a cave that's about 5 minutes walk from the city center?
@@jampine8268 The dead zone doesn't even reach the city, it's basically only the crater that holds the mouth of the cave, and if you talk to the leader of the bandits who live in the cave, they'll say that the animals will be after them if you take the relic, and then they try to kill you.
I agree that Skyrim is way more immersive than most modern open world games today. I liked that the NPCs handily scheduled tasks and did small talk when you pass by. Other games I have played the NPCs were just quest focused or bunch of robots to make world look busy.
A lot of towns in the American West were built around naturally occurring springs, where groundwater came to the surface- no large body of water required.
okay but where is Akila's Groundwater spring? If there was like a building at or near the center of town that was like, a groundwater processing plant, it would make sense, but afaik, no such building exists.
@averyodowd6448 I dunno about Akila specifically, never played the game. Just thought it bore mentioning as it seemed like an overconfident assumption that any settlement would have to be located near a large body of surface water.
My biggest flaw with starfield immersion is you don’t really see anyone working/ sleeping eating etc. you just see a bunch of npc kind of existing. Shops don’t have a day night schedule. Npc just sit in-front of monitors. In Skyrim the there were markets npc interactions other npc visiting shops everything in starfield os just stark and empty and feels like place holders
While Skyrims Cities did have significant flaws and were very small, one of the main issues for me is that new Atlantis is meant to be a capital of a space civilisation, yet not only is it not that big- is is the only significant settlement in the entire planet- add to that the fact that all their other planets are basically empty and you’ve got a world that feels unbelievable form the off. At least Skyrims cities sustained a solid base level of believability- despite significant flaws- such as tiny farms for example.
If the next elder scrolls have massive cities filled with no name NPC's and houses you cant enter but are way bigger, I would see that as a loss. Other games have that and does that well, but the Elder Scrolls is unique in the kind of interactivity you get in their cities, albeit small. Though I think with Bethesdas budget they could and should probably still scale them up somewhat. But at this point i have little faith in them.
I'd have been fine with some semi randomised NPC's. Make a computer roll a dice to pick an upbringing, two or three memories and a personality archetype, from a few hundred options (resulting in millions of potential combinations) assign them a family and a career then automate a schedule. Add a few details depending on your rolls like things they would have in their house, if they are late/early to work etc and I would be very happy. Obviously, important characters would be entirely handcrafted but the above system should allow you to quickly fill a few districts with named personality holding NPC's. Probably the biggest cost would be in voice actors, I reckon you'd need at least 50 to record a lot of different lines to make it feel believable (same amount as Skyrim, but probably more contexts needed).
You only THINK they could scale them up? Remember that Morrowind had Mournhold and Oblivion had Imperial City and New Sheoth. They absolutely have the budget to make bigger cities, but Starfield just proved that Bethesda doesn't give a f* and wants to release a half finished product, with the other half being overpriced CC microtransactions.
I don't mind the cities from Starfield not really feeling equipped to handle being self-sufficient because you need to remember that in that universe, transporting materials from one star system to another is as simple as driving five minutes down the street so having all of their society spread out so far does not really hold them back with how space travel works for them
It's like literally every aspect of the game is purpose built to prevent immersion from building. And not just the constant loading screens. The entire setting and world building is so un-immersive it's almost an achievement.
the fact that in Skyrim the shopkeepers lock them until they open again in the morning gives it so much more life, makes it feel like they are real people too.
Lakes, melting snow from the mountains, and waterfalls springing from underground sources. There's a whole video about it by Any Austin and it's not that bad.
You know the game is Timeless is when It's still better to some games released nowadays. I dont think Bethesda can capture such a cultural game like Skyrim is. Despite it having a Sequel in the next coming of years. I just hope it delivers.
This reminds me of how much time you can spend at the start of a game of Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress just choosing where you want to embark, taking into account the climate, resources, dangers, and geographic location to other things, because those are all important things to consider when building a settlement. Bethesda clearly never took a single one of those things into consideration when making Starfield.
@gadgetselec4153 2 quick questions and i'm very open to listen every opinion: How in the world something this approximative (small places, dumb economics, 99% of the people you meet are bandits or guards, ecc) can fell immersive to you? If all the people you know in real life start repeating one single sentence from now on every time you walk near them, you will not think something is really off?
@@giacomo8875 I'm wasting my time on you: no one thinks about this when consuming entertainment , if it's good enough it's immersive, compared to other videogames Skyrim is immersive
@gadgetselec4153 is me the one who is losing time on you because i tried to argument my point in a civilized manner but you just proven you lack the courage to accept a fact that the majority of the players of this game are well aware of, you are not disproving anything i say, you are only capable of arguing like a child. A game is immersive until it fail to be, and the things i said are big fails and are only three example i write on the spot, there are a lot, and every skyrim player know this very well. But nobody in the word is stopping you to play this game for the next 12 years and killing nazeem for 300 times because he bully you. This game is only immersive if you look on the surface, and by definition this can't be immersive, because they are distant opposite. But why i'm loosing my time when i could argue like you do by saying "no it isn't🤗"? Enjoy your game btw
As much as I want to agree with you and dunk on starfeild, your arguments are pretty weak. I grew up in a desert town that gets water from underground and it has no reason for being there other than people just settled down in that spot. No, the reason cities don't work in starfeild is because they don't feel realistic.
It can be a case when we look at moding project for older games, like Tamriel Rebuild. Back then, there's instances in earlier developement where cities are bigger with clutters and generic npcs, but it only make it felt emptier with so many unnecessary distances between places. 'Modder megalomania' they said. Then, they revisit those old places to make it tighter, smaller but most placements felt much more purposefull and fun to explore. Something about city design not need to be big to feel 'immersive'.
I always sound crazy saying this but I think Starfield came 10-15 years too late. The culture at large has largely quit caring about "space exploration". That coupled with Starfield's lack of meaningful lore made sure the game was DOA
Akila City's water issue might be similar to Las Vegas, Nevada. While Lake Mead is relatively close (about 40 miles away), and is where Las Vegas now draws its water from, that wasn't always the case. Originally Las Vegas relied on a series of underground springs to sustain its population. If you look at Vegas in Google Maps, the point it marks (well into the center of the metropolitan area) is roughly where the Spring Mounds were. Las Vegas was founded in 1905 where the technology to access that water would be no where near what the Freestar Collective would be able to utilize. I don't see an issue with Akila City utilizing underground water easily. However, it is still weird that they would choose to found the city there instead of somewhere with easier access. Las Vegas was settled where it was as it was the center point for the railroads between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, making it a perfect resupply stop. My only guess was that Solomon Cole had been mentioned as studying the gravitational anomalies we know to be the artifacts. With Akila City adjacent to one such anomaly. Perhaps that is why he chose to settle there? I believe it is also mentioned the gravitational anomaly helps keep some of the wildlife at bay, so perhaps Akila City is one of the safer spots on the planet. It would be nice if it was detailed a bit more in the game, like at the Akila City museum, instead of having to speculate.
I can also suspend my disbelief a bit more with a fantasy setting that is also a bit medieval in a sense. Built for the purpose of survival and having small businesses and economies. That and I can walk over every inch of the towns in Skyrim seamlessly for the most part. Starfield however has an issue with cities where they feel so small because you can’t walk over every part of them and need to use loading screens to even go to other parts of the city in general. And yeah the other things you brought up also make sense.
If you pay close attention in the game, you’ll find out that Solomon Coe founded that settlement because it was close to the anomaly that he discovered. It becoming the capital of the free star collective happened way after his time. Also in the game, there’s technology to extract water from the atmosphere.
I suspect the reason why Starfield's cities aren't built with the same considerations as the cities in Skyrim is "We have technology": ○ no water - haul it from somewhere else; ○ no land for agriculture - hydroponics or some other sci-fi solution; It seems the Skyrim team did a proper job in researching how cities in the medieval times developed, but how would an advanced civilisation with interstellar travel capabilities would develop its frontier cities? Who know, they'll probably solve their problems with advanced technology. But many games feature people from advanced civilisations stranded on other worlds, or even just outside of our normal one, struggling to survive in the same way we did centuries ago.
If that's the case, why didn't they show it? I would have loved to see what creative solutions they would have come up with, but instead there's just nothing...
@BetaDude40 Because it's faster and, more importantly, cheaper to not show it. Given how everyone complains of how empty the maps are, maybe they should have done this, than making huge, but empty maps.
Whiterun Hold is also - plains, vast plains. Whiterun city is strategically placed on a tall hill, where you could observe unobstracted enemy's approach from afar
23:43 There are examples of buildings and locations like this in starfield too. I stumbled upon New Homestead while exploring the solar systems organically, and it was PACKED with lore and little mini quests and felt very lived in. Starfield is very hit or miss with its settlements but New Homestead and a few others like it were done right
Sorry but Night City is by far the fakest open world I've ever been in. Sure, it looks gorgeous, but the NPCs do not actually behave there, they're just spawned. It has all the A without the I.
With regard to Constellation not fitting properly into New Atlantis. In the files for Starfield, along with concept art for the game, it's possible to see that originally, the Lodge was meant to be on the Eye, and the Eye wasn't meant to be in orbit of Jemison. Instead Constellation was in the Delta Pavonis system. Files indicate that system was meant to be inhabited by a faction named "Lodge" and all the planets and moons in Delta Pavonis are named, despite nothing actually being there.
Easy to rag on Starfield but it's one of the few games I've played where there are tons of named NPCs with multiple dialogue options and personal histories. The only other games that really do this on a big scale, are other Bethesda games Even Bioware games don't have that. Maybe The Witcher does
To be honest neither feel like real cities. It’s also REALLY hard to make a city feel real when you’re making either A) a massive city for a fantasy setting or B) a modern city. Both are just too big to make 1 to 1 for the most part. I think the only game that even got close in my opinion was Cyberpunk 2077. No other game makes a massive city feel believable because that’s how big real cities are. Starfield cannot do that for obvious reasons. Same thing for Skyrim, they could never have made whiterun or winterfell even feel like the lore city they’re based on
@ I don’t care to interact with every single character. I would have liked more interaction similar to how red dead redemption is but to be honest I care more about the size of the city than that
What's good about Skyrim is that even if the cities are small, most of them can feel like home. For example after multiple playthroughs Riften always ends up being my main house/city because I feel as if I'm part of its inhabitants after playing for a while, while my brother would always end up living in Solitude. You get attached to the places.
On the bit about him talking about the absense of influential families in the UC's capital, is an unfortunate side effect of another aspect of the lore that starfield created about the UC. Where within the world, it does hammer home that there's some kind of crappy things about the UC, where just being born within the UC doesn't mean you have UC citizenship. and you only obtain it through service to the UC, and it can vary from person to person based on their aptitude. Which literally results in the fact that just being a child of a powerful UC citizen, doesn't mean you yourself have any benefits of that power. and almost by nature, the UC kind of creates this system where those with power, keep it, but don't pass it down generationally. so there aren't really any influential families, because they don't operate that way. There are individuals who have sway, and may get talked about because they have a leadership role. But no families or clans exist that have power within the UC, because they created a system that doesn't allow for a family to have that kind of sway.
Haven't played Stanfield and haven't watched the vid yet, just going off the title for the moment. If Skyrim's "cities" feel more realistic than Starfield's then holy **** they _really_ dropped the ball on Starfield. Skyrim's cities are absolutely awful and among the worst in the entire TES series.
Oblivion?? have you seen the design of the Imperial city? how is THAT the seat for the empire!? Entrance so steep it's nearly vertical, steps so steep the player literally falls down, and no urban sprawl.
This is explained in the game if you look and ask around, Megaton salvages and trades parts and scrap to Rivet City which is a hub for experimenting with grown foods, thus Rivet City sends food there in exchange for salvage parts they need. Now where exactly do they get the water from, they get that from unground water system, you do a mission there to save or destroy it. Megaton also appears to trade water with other places in game. So, Megaton is simply a trading centre for region, which would be correct if this game was real life. A counterpart for Megaton, in our world would be Xian, China, a historical trade city on the silk road trade route.
A technological society does not have to situate itself near any resource. Cities on planet Earth and in any medieval fantasy have to do so because they are not developed enough for that to not be an issue anymore. But for people who arrived by spaceship, who'd have traveled dozens of lightyears to get there, arguing about a couple more miles on the planet surface is nitpicking. Why is Akila city exactly there? Maybe because when Solomon Coe arrived advanced telemetry he wouldn't have had access to lightyears afar revealed that Akila is tectonically unstable, and they picked the best spot for that to be less of an issue. Then there's the cultural aspect. You are comparing apples to oranges, society didn't EVOLVE where they settled in Starfield, an EVOLVED society settled these spots. The feeling of them just being where they are for no apparent reason comes from the fact that they as a technological society do not rely on being situated at the most advantageous spot their natural environment can provide for the multitude of needs less advanced societies would require to thrive on, so they do not integrate into that environment in any way a city established in the antiquity would, there is no historicity there... so you are pitting thousands of years of pre-industrial happenstance against hundred and thirty years of space colonization. A technological society’s settlement choices are deliberate, informed by innovation, not driven by necessity or tradition. The cities in Starfield didn't *evolve* with their societies over thousands of years, they were *designed* by their societies who lived there less than a hundred fifty. Societies need several hundred years even if you look at Earth's history, to accumulate traditions, histories, and multifaceted identities tied to their surroundings. A hundred and thirty years is barely enough time for the settlers of that fresh new planet to adapt fully, let alone create a rich cultural tapestry. It wasn't until the 1700s, after two to three hundred years of colonization, conflict, and gradual development, that events in America began to leave an indelible mark on the cultural zeitgeist. Therefore your criticism based on such a minuscule timescale is as airy as you claim these cities to be. I get it, I get it, Starfield has so many problems, most of the others were already discussed ad nauseam and are so glaring it's like shooting fish in a barrel, so you need a different topic of complaint. But this? Nah... it's a non-argument.
If a player doesn't end up questioning why a thing exists, that's all the "realism" a game needs. You are believing the lie and are checked in, that's what suspension of disbelief is. Every time I went to Akila City it felt like it was some shitty outpost. The part that makes me hate it the most is all the dirt and mud roads. Really? A civilization that has Galaxy level influence and it has dirt roads in its capital still?
6:56 Maybe youre answering your own question here. Once they realized that a gold mining settlement in Akila wouldn’t feel differentiated enough from Cydonia, they could have scrapped that aspect. Still, I wonder if there’s a lore explanation for the settlement location
One of my problems with Starfield is the almost universal lack of past lore/history. In Skyrim you'll find HUGE books of lore from the 1st era down to current day. Hundreds of detailed journals (some in multiple parts) are placed in the world to give the quests context and history. Starfield has some data slates and computer log entries with a tiny bit of information, the actual books in game are all just a page or two of classic literature meant to trade off to the Akila bookseller. Something like "why Akila City wasnt placed near water" wouldn't happen in Skyrim, there would be an answer aomewhere in Skyrim lore, or at least some theories backed by lore.
How about the human fact that polluting people put their settlements near rivers. Starfield is based upon knowledge of the sciences, and such information about Akilas choice is hidden in human history books. Like what you could find on your bookshelf or library today. Ask your local library or scholar on what kind of people chose in history to settle on rivers in humanity's lore. Kinda like how you have to learn about how Argon in the game effects the player, after searching up about argon and finding that 1994 a person died just because of argon.
@@qwertyvypez There is nowhere near the amount of lore in Starfield! Skyrim has multiple volumes with pages and pages dedicated to ancient emperors like Pelagius and descriptions of how the province was conquered, lost and reconquered by the Nords. Yes, I get that our own history makes up part of Starfield's history, obviously, that's not what bothers me. But the amount of lore we receive in game for those missing years between today and the foundation of the settled systems is horrible. It's like giving a current events history lesson that says "In 1492 Columbus "discovered" the new world....and in 2025 SpaceX is planning a mission to Mars.". I'd say 90% of Starfield lore comes from the narrated museum exhibit on your way to the pilot simulator. That's not enough to keep me interested for long.
Lmao, "Skyrim cities feel realistic", how did we get there, seriously... Y'all are so desperate for reactionary opinions that you're willing to shamelessly lie. Everyone has been rightfully criticizing and mocking Skyrim's cities for years and all of sudden they are great just so you can make a negative video about Starfield for clicks.
Skyrim had """cities""" that had less people than a fucking hamlet during the Plague. They aren't realistic, we just had different standards back then. Even though I'm not really a fan of The Witcher 3, they made the cities and towns actually feel like it. Starfield is the first step, on TES VI they will certainly use the scale of Starfield's cities and make it more detailed, more lived-in
It's fine in the Witcher 3 but not Starfield? Oblivion even had better cities and towns than Skyrim. Does GTA feel lifeless with all the nameless npcs?
Witcher 3 did it soo much better that comparing it to Starfield is an insult. As always with Bethesda the problem isn't the core idea, but the lackluster execution.
I actually really hate that part of the Witcher 3 and GTA. I feel like I am playing in a post-apocalyptic dystopia full of random bots with no life or purpose that just till fields or stand by a crosswalk when playing those games. You can't interact with the NPCs, they say like 1-2 premade catchphrases at you. Now Oblivion I do agree with, I love Oblivion. But the other two games suck soo much.
@@LycanFerret how long do you think it would take you to make 10000 voiced npcs in starfield using creation kit guides by youtube channels: 510deshawn; & Jramosworks
One Issue I have with Cities in general is that often times they set up these cities as like THE BASTION OF CIVILIZATION and then you go there and its 5 houses and 2 stores. Like how for example the Imperial Capital is a joke compared to the Lore of it. And while I know the limitations, I can take it in Riverwood, some backwater village in skyrim not THE IMPERIAL CITY OF THE EMPIRE. If there is a place for insane scale and thousands of nameless NPC, its those places. But most Video games have either named NPCs and Routines, or only spawn in stuff. I think Witcher and Novigrad did a good job, besides also having big events happen in the lore like half of the city burning down, etc. Like how London basically dissappeared like 3 or 5 times in history before exploding in size. I rather see this if the City is a joke. Let the War with the Dominion be clearly seen, and make half of the city completly empty, just so it looks big. But I find it hard to praise Skyrim Villages when even back in the day, were considered underwhelming. Starfield just showed what happens if you take any interesting lore or characters out of the already no substance cities and just scale it up.
It's so funny how they suddenly pretend Skyrim's cities were great just so they can make a negative comparison with Starfield. Reactionary bullshit at its finest. And then they defend Skyrim's cities by saying "they are obviously just smaller versions of a true city so it's okay", but following that logic you could say exactly the same to defend Starfield's cities...
Skrims cities have always felt small. But. They still felt alive. There was sth going on. You could interact with everything. Visit every house. Talk to every NPC. Things changed. People came and disappeared. Id always prefer a smaller city like Skyrims over a big city like Novigrad that acts merely as a background for the story to happen. Most houses are just facade. NPCs are just nameless randoms. I like that it feels bigger and louder yeah. But it feels like those old paintings. Sure theyre somewhat impressive but the longer you look at those old portraits the more unease you feel. Thats also why its hillarious when people always cry Unreal Engine blabla. First not every game with UE is next gen graphics. Second the games feel like plastic and fake ambience
@@TheRealNeonwarrior Vivec City? the drab cantons that look nearly identical to each other? looks like something a 6-year-old would make in Spore. Vivec City doesn't look like it even fits the surrounding environment, but was just plopped down there because they had nowhere else to put it. Not saying Skyrim is like a flawless game, but seriously, Vivec City is better designed than anything in Skyrim?
You don't realize just how dead Starfields cities feel until you notice that NPCs don't enter shops or go back to their homes, shopkeepers work 24/7 and never sleep. They completely removed radiant AI.
As basic as it was, it still managed to make Skyrim cities feel more alive and not just like you're surrounded by background characters in a bad sitcom.
Well sa
I mean, Starfield is a space age sci fi game, with spaceships coming and going at all hours, realistically shops would be open 24/7, with npcs at most rotating between 8 hours shifts.
If anything, Bethesda cities are still too small, Night city in Cyberpunk 2077 is a good example of how big a proper sci fi city would be, and in a city with millions of people living together, the Radiant AI is just not going to work.
@pauloroberto4693 yea but in cyberpunk the city is a majority of the whole game map, for a game Luke skyrim or starfield for that matter that is simply not feasible, also even large modern cities can have recurring characters.
I'd argue the main way to go about this whole scale thing is to split the city into districts and simply not make every district accessible, this makes you able to work with a more reasonable scale and opens up possibilities for future expansions
@keepitclean8791 but starfield does have radiant ai. The npcs do sleep. They do go to their homes.
simple solution; have it be two or three shopkeepers who work in rotas, that way you get the immersion while also not having to spend time waiting just for the shops to be open
Could be just me, but I prefer 50 NPC with full day schedule, family, history and homes to 100 nameless filler citizens
100% because when I break in a house, its so much more immersive when I know from whom I steal. xD
They added general npc to make cities more populated.
average far cry and A.C gameplay
@@vinniciusrosa8284 yeah, but that doesn't work because it only feels populated if we are able to immerse ourselves into the belief that those NPCs are people, and it's a lot harder to do that to some generic randomly generated NPC than it is to do it with an actual character with backstory and purpose.
I'd rather a city actually feel like a city. 50 npcs in what's supposed to be a capital city would not be immersive at all. And making every npc in a CITY have a family and history is not feasible. And how is it more immersive to know who you're stealing from? The average thief isn't going to know the entire family of a person they're stealing from. They aren't gonna know them by name
Knowing every single person by name in a city is not immersive
If your answer is that settlements were founded next to cranberry bushes, then you played Age of Empires
Sometimes I can't find the berry bushes on Nomad so I have to settle. Then I find them in late-Imp Lol
@@flamingosedai1820the rare player that starts from nomad. lol
Skyrim cities are almost fully functional, just scaled down
Starfield is the opposite
Well put.
Exactly. You put into words what I've felt for a while but couldn't figure out how to say
Starfield cities might be big, but they seem fake for some strange reason. Also all Starfield cities feel like they are put in the middle of nowhere... if they were settled long ago there would have been smaller settlements around, cities are never alone. Starfield cities feel more like spaceships, but without the space... there is no reason why smaller settlements would not exist... also nobody would let dangerous wildlife just to roam around the city like it does, in a realistic scenario.
@@Slav4o911Realistically in an interstellar society, even "small towns" would be so large that you wouldn't able to see the edge of the town on the horizon from city central. You're right. Starfield "cities" feel like medieval forts made of plastic that got dropped down in random locations. They could've just made it so you can only explore a portion of the city and left the rest OOB. That alone would've done wonders for immersion.
Developers need to shift their thinking from bigger maps to denser maps. I’d rather have a map that’s 10 times smaller, but every area is packed with detail, more lively npc’s, every building is explorable and actually serves a purpose
Depends on the game, I think for a space exploration game how starfield did it works. Maybe they could have made each map a bit denser so there is less travel time between POIs but spread out large maps fit this style of game imo.
I'd prefer they do make the bigger maps and add more to them. One of the long time Skyrim vloggers had looked into the teams that developed Starfield and he said there was only 1 writer for Starfield, and it shows. Then we have one of the devs say that several small studios made different pieces of the game and none of them interacted. They all worked in a vacuum. That would explain poor story lines and disjointedness...at least to those who play slower. If you race through the game paying little attention to detail you will likely miss most of that.
Id be so happy with a game with a Skyrim or oblivion sized map, that was just truly busy, with things to do in every nook and cranny. Thats the main issue i hold with the newer fallout titles, 4 and 76 have such massive game maps that sometimes they feel incredibly barren and empty (in a bad game design way and not the post apocalyptic way), starfield takes it to a whole different level with how empty it can feel
In space sure. But the hub areas, the cities themselves feel incredibly empty. You don't necessarily need to have ALL cities be packed with npcs all with their own schedules and so on, but starfield is almost completely empty of it and lacks any form of immersion, imo.
sounds like you just dont like open world games
Skyrim may have small cities, but at least it feels like everything exists for a purpose.
so does starfeild . new atlantis shows us originally the developement and culture of the uc which is the superpower in its galaxy . as time passes and we get to learn about vae victus and us shady shit we are introduced to the well and cydonia ( which is a safe haven for everything illegal including piracy )
this shows us for the culture uc has it is built on shoody ground and shows the dark underbelly of the uc .
which is much different from the lock spaceship which is a pirate controlled anarachy area .
which is much different from the genderdyne run neon city
so each Handcrafted major area in starfeild is unique and with purpose hell even side content cities like the planet of caiopia and the place where the ship crashed shows us how the crew manged to survive before dying and how the child of the dead crew survives .
@@techgeek123-em7uf it feels superficial and theatrical
"Winterhold would like to have a word"
To be fair even the npc and the jarl are like "You came for the college right? No other reason to come here".
Its also canon that the cities and population are larger than what you the player are seeing. So the entire time you can if you want, enjoy the concept that everything is scaled down in order for you to experence the game.
@@808lukas1 how so ? both skyrim and starfeild have cities with named npc and lore and areas which makes sense . yet ur telling me that skyrim feels real because its skyrim ? thats a childish claim that isnt supported by data much less supported by ur own argument comment when u are actually mood for a discussion
The part where the city becomes the wilderness always made so much sense in Skyrim. It’s not just the gate but signs of settlement leading up to it. Like the horse stables or patrols.
Starfield has none of that. Its like a Massivly Hard border between "Settlement" and "Wilderness" and its like only several feet between the two. Which makes them standout incredibly because there is Nothing around the settlements, just vast wilderness almost literally in front of your doorstep. none of the supplemental things necessary to run a city or even roads.
I get that its a space game but Not Everyone flys a ship and your ship cant get you literally anywhere. Your not going to be landing on top of a tree canopy and it would be a huge waste of resources to use a space capable vessel for exclusive in-atmospheric transport
Or the odd farm
Sometimes I larp as an NPC in Skyrim as a older save, since I accomplished everything. Going through my daily stroll around the city in the morning, eating at the tavern, going to the Jarl and complain, go back to the tavern and drink a lot of mead, punch the hold guards, get imprisoned, return home the next day and sleep.
Ah. Truly the best days.
The one thing that really fucks me off about the dialogue around starfield is that no one talks about the biggest problems with the game, the tone, aesthetics and world building. Fallout has identity, Elder Scrolls has IDENTITY, Starfield is void of any kind of interesting identity and world building. The UC and FC are cookie cutter factions, their history is uninspiring, and 3/4 of the faction quest lines have virtually nothing to say about the ideology that drives them.
Bro, I've been saying this from the beginning, but people refuse to be real with themselves.
This is what we get because of the prevalence of tabloid-styled 'journalism' and outrage media in gaming RUclips (prolly other sites too, idk don't really use much). Genuinely substantial criticism gets buried underneath the noise of 'outdated engine', 'fire Emil Pagliarulo', etc. Of course I'm just cherry-picking the bad complaints, but the parroting gets tiring after a while.
Also, thanks. I think you nailed the reason why I just can't be interested in Starfield.
Starfield feels a lot like Arena. Which is a weird thing to say, but it feels like it's the start of a new series and could be something really interesting the way Daggerfall is the real start of the Elder Scrolls series.
That's something I feel like is overlooked too, it's all extremely safe. There's nothing that challenges you and so nothing interesting. Think about what people thought and how society was organized in 1720. That's how far in the future this game is set. And yet it's still just the same old same old.
The game is designed to be politically correct and absolutely safe in all aspects. That includes the generic 'NASA' style , to how the NPC look, sound, and act. And how the story progresses and what the player can do. It's pretty obvious why they did this, if you know you know.
What civilization need?
Me:Food
"Water"
Seems like I played too much Rimworld due it need no water.
Generally speaking, water is also a prerequisite for food. Food also needs water. If there is water, there is likely to be food.
Dwarf Fortress players would answer beer. loll
@@iminumst7827as austrian i would say the Same tbh
And this is why I can't play without Dub's Bad Hygene. Water in vanilla Rimworld is way too much ignored.
BEER AND MEAD FOR THE DWARVES!!...Oh..NOT dwarf fortress? Uh..sure, yeah, water, sure i guess...If you're a pointy-eared cannibal leaf lover.
The sad thing is, Bethesda hired Elianora, the Skyrim house modder. And apparently ban her from making gorgeous stuff right away.
Like, Elianora was hired ???
@@johnnystonks3970 Yes, and she was put on zone making on Starfield. And you really see that they shackled her and made her build slop.
@@LordNecronit’s sad then
I blinked and the videogames industry got so disappointing that people are suddenly praising Skyrim’s cities.
Edit: replies and other comments indicate that they’d prefer to have ~50 fleshed out NPCs over thousands of faceless ones. This is a false dichotomy. Not only that, but it also applies to Skyrim. There are significantly more generic NPCs than there are named ones in the game. Whiterun has 78 citizens and 38 guards.
I thought I was the only one. I'm glad someone said it.
i read the title and was so confused haha since when are skyrims citys realistic? especealy when there are like only 20 residents in the captital lol
The bar keeps going lower.
I was just as confused. Skyrim? The game with villages smaller than many Hamlets??
But I still rather take those 10-20 people over 2000 NPCs that phase in and out of existence.
To be honest, skyrim counter-culture got WAY too bad recently
Yes, bethesda has fallen, yes, skyrim re-releases are a scam, yes, the creation club is a travesty
But at its core, Skyrim was one of the most beloved and influential games of all time, and it deserves that title, and it deserves praise, as much as people nowadays seem to love to bring up its many flaws and shortcomings.
Part of the problem is the lack of filler OUTSIDE of the city. There are usually a small amount of infrastructure surronding it, but ultimately, these cities simply exist in a void, no one ever apparently leaves the city borders. No roads, no houses outside, not even any abandoned buildings.
They can SORTA maintain the illusion while you're in the city, but the second you leave, the man behind the curtain is revealed.
Do you realise how many people you need to make a city? And time? In a space game? This aint supposed to be a 120 exabyte game, only 120gb + mods. And local NPCs are sometimes found far away from their New Atlantis.
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo GTA 3 did a much larger city with a team of 23 people using super primitive tools on less than 1gb of hard drive space.
Some outskirts would not require new textures or NPC's and mostly pre-existing assets could be used. Remember, Starfield had 500+ very talented people working on it.
As it is look outwards from any city in Starfield and you'll see open country.
@@Lancasterlaw1175 and while New Vegas is still insanely condensed at least in that Fallout game there are ruined suburbs and industrial parks outside of the city core that gradually thin out to wilderness.
Hell, even Night City, a city whose whole lore basically makes it a super dense, tiny city surrounded by an uninhabited wasteland, still has the urbanization cutoff into more suburban areas and eventually rural plots and ghost towns and farms (though, again, the cutoff from urban to wasteland being so sharp in 77 is kind of the point)
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo And they still couldn't put a f*cking highway out of the city?
Classic case of “bigger doesn’t mean better.” Walking past 100 nameless npcs is so much worse than walking through white run and hearing the ACTUAL characters go about their daily lives. Also no matter how small almost every character in Skyrim tries to have a small quest attached to them that provides history and lore about them or the town.
You do realise, you too can spend $2 billion like rockstar just creating 1000 individually voiced npc characters today in starfield yourself with the creation kit. Or you can do it for just the cost of creation kit and your own voice.
What?
@@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo They didn't even have to be voiced, but having a Random Name Generator so each of those citizens has a semi-unique name, can go a very long way even if they do nothing but procedurally walk around. Random Citizen #5341 is significantly less impactful, than Bob Bobington the Third, even if you never see Bob again.
@@Triaxx2 it's a space game that has to be both technically better and better looking than Fallout 4, fitting on 120GB sized disk, but of course the disc version only could pack 47GB, the rest had to be download.
Today it already has the random named npcs mod where npcs can have 9 billion different names. Or where you yourself can follow creation kit guides on youtube by 510Deshawn or Jramosworks, and make your own unique named voiced follower hireable npcs. And there are mods where you can make any npc human robot animal a follower. Not to mention mods & creations where you can make upto 9 billion outposts (up from the 8-24 in vanilla), have different varieties to points of interest, increased number of pois on a map, denser forests, new quests, quests you can make, I even saw a spooky Gate 11 styled quest that SistaCitizen was live streaming. All these additions easily made with a tiny change in the ini files or easily makeable with the creation kit. Someones even already made a VR mod. But these additions can fill up your 1tb storage as much as you like. They really didnt need to be in the base game.
Bethesda could have easily made the game without the blue checkmarker and made the game like old school runescape without runelite. But today, people use runelite so that they can finish quests and get those end game items, which for starfield, ship parts are level capped as are the variation of pois. Bethesda wanted you to play the game based upon the gameplay mechanic lore they were setting. You can rip up that lore and make andreja bald, sarah a brunette and cora a snail 🐌 like alien, unalice essential npcs and cancel their quest lines today with current mods. They ain't going to be on that 47gb bluray disk, but you can download them after you downloaded the 55+GB.
As for citizen names, how many videos have you seen of citizens complaining to cops about being identified and asked for their name.
@@Cvlancer He is salty you critizied starfield.
Its hard to settle near water when the whole planet is constantly randomly generated by a ai
A cursory google search suggests that the major cities of Starfield are handcrafted, and that the planets aren't randomised when playing.
This means that Starfield's major cities are as procedurally generated as the Elder Scrolls games.
@taliyeth it was a joke about the world's constantly changing randomly
There's only a giant waterfall and a lake in New Atlantis, and what nerd has ever heard of underwater springs?
Easier to bitch when 50% of new players haven't even finished the first mission.
The thing is... it's not generated by AI, it's generated by the most simple number generator... nothing fancy. If it was generated by AI it would not have been that boring.
New Atlantis is the size of Whiterun, riften, Windhelm and winter hold combined together but feels so lifeless.
The size is still way too small though- it's the literal capital of all of humanity for the last 170 years, but look in almost any direction but inwards and you'll see countryside.
Compare it to say the city of GTA 3 (develped by 23 people) and you'll see that not only the size tiny but also the NPC's are loads less responsive.
@@Lancasterlaw1175But GTA, just like Cyberpunk, is entirely built around that single settlement. In Bethesda's games, cities mostly act as hubs to plan or prepare adventures elsewhere.
It doesn't justify the poor AI and weak ambience, but still, it needs to be considered.
I probably would use the word "believable" instead of "realistic". NPCs going to work, coming home, and sleeping at night is believable. And I think 24hr shops in Starfield could be too, if they just had the NPCs trade places with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd shift workers.
Like in fallout 4 with the robot and the lady that hates synths.
"Immersive" would be a better term.
Why would a space age shop needs NPC vendor is beyond me.
@@bestliutr I can see having a person there just for make it not feel like a vending machine, although I'd still automate it if sales didn't justify three shifts of workers, so night would be covered.
Even at their rather small scale, each city of Skyrim is still worth exploring. Every nook and cranny has something to see, do, or play around with.
Every "city" of Starfield is just a nesting doll of containers within containers with arbitrary loot and no drive to explore for niche things.
I enjoyed Neon, it was interestig to explore it.
Every nook and cranny has... radiant or fetch quests. Yup, truly the peak of gaming.
12:42 Saarthal was the first city built in Skyrim after the arrival of Nords from Atmora sometime in the middle of the Merethic Era. Saarthal was also the first capital of Nord civilization in Tamriel, as well as the largest of the ancient Nordic cities
Good catch, probably should have clarified oldest continually inhabited city*
I think Labyrinthion the biggest ancient city and capital. Saarthal is the oldest and 1st one but fell to the Falmer/snow elves in the Night of Tears. This lead to the return of Ysgramor with his 2 sons (these 3 being supposedly the only survivors) and the 500 Companions
@@aysseralwan wasn't Labyrinthian built much later, during the reign of the dragon cult?
@@krasmazov8 yes, but still in the Merethic Era and I think we have no years about when all this happened exactly so I'm not sure how much later it was built. Also my pushback is on the part where the original comment says Saarthal was the largest ancient city
Playing on Skyrim’s survival mode is extremely satisfying to come into even the smallest settlement.
As I get older, survival mode is a lot more fun.
I think you would really like the Constellations modpack.
Survival is incredibly satisfying, with the carriages and ferry overhaul mod in place of fast travel. Use a portable camping kit for when you are too far from a boat/carriage and there's a cave nearby. You get a real feeling for distance instead of teleporting everywhere.
Anything in the north, up towards Volkihar can be pretty rough if you're not prepared (blizzards, nighttime etc.). It can be a good idea to also get mods that remove the compass, map and quest markers so you navigate based off landmarks.
@@grendelbiter303 what’s that?
@@AshenBuncakes agreed, fast travel ruins the game. Like, I get it, it’s handy, but sometimes it breaks my immersion.
@@adrianscorch It's a Collection on Nexusmods that makes the game much harder. You need to eat, sleep and equip yourself against the cold. Monsters don't level with you. Adds many new weapons, armor and spells and new lands. Also adds backpacks and tents and the ability to craft a fireplace anywhere in the wilderness. The start is different depending on which race/class you choose. Also adds many graphical improvements, it looks like a new game. You do need a powerful PC though.
There is literally a moat between Akila’s spaceport and city. The only way to access the city from the spaceport is via a bridge over this moat. Perfect place for a river. It’s like they started to create an area that makes sense and then just stopped. This relatively minor issue is like a microcosm of everything that is wrong with Starfield: the beginnings of ideas that never get properly developed.
I don't remember there being water in it though....but if would be a catch basin for the frequent rains.
"Skyrim's cities" and "realistic" are words i never thought I'd hear together...
@@geekypleer1202 it's just the music. That and a river in skyrim, with butterflies, and someones left behind caught fish smoking away.
Which would be nonsense in a space game. A space game is all about terrain, emptiness, zero g, technology, escape, science, industrial accidents, people interaction, rocks, ruins, earth history lore, nasa, rockets, lasers. There's literally no life on mars. No rivers.
They aren't that realistic, but they are relatively immersive if you ignore the tiny size and the way the NPCs repeat the same dialogue too much. (seriously, why do they have several voices for guards, but they all use the same dialogue even for the fluff lines?) Their defenses especially tend to be for show, and ineffective if you look at them closely, with features being the wrong size, lacking access to spots defenders would need to shoot from, and even some just having a hole where a gate should be.
It's sadly obvious why Akila is where it is. The devs just needed a place for the city and they saw that there is free space. This place was as good as any other, so they just put it there.
Starfield had a huge lack of "why?" Nothing clear to explain how all of humanity is down to a few hundred thousand people. No one took two seconds to ask " why should this make sense?"
That's the thing. Nothing about Starfield's setting and world building seems credible or makes much sense. It just doesn't work on a fundamental conceptual level. No heart, no soul, no character. No IDENTITY!
There is actually two separate reasons. The first is the colony wars, between the UC and the Freestar, which is where the mechs and bio weapons come from.
The second for spoiler reasons for those who might care, is down here and it's because of the gravity drive testing that turned earth into an uninhabitable desert world which is something you discover later as you progress the main story.
@Triaxx2 Its odd survivors would not have a lot of iconography of Earth. I understand it's a huge undertaking fot devs to try and account for what would make it the most realistic. Still, each of these populations to lose their identity of all Earth cultures just seems very strange. I've kind of concluded that it's partly due to being an alternate universe so the symbolism could be everywhere it's just not familiar to my eyes because it's a different Earth.
@Triaxx2 I also don't understand anything about the reasoning there would have been a colony war. Let's say it's resources or something then you follow with another question of why. And you keep asking why until you've worked out all the different details but that didn't seem to be done. It's a very superficial factional divide. It feels a great deal like outer worlds with just this incredibly shallow set of implications but you look into it even a little bit and it just fizzes away into meaninglessness.
Sure there could be some sort of tiny bit of wardrop but that's the opposite of it being saturated with motivations. People all over the place constantly from the start of the game to the end of the game should be articulating their feelings about the reason for their organization. I don't know if it's because some developers live in a information bubble and exist amongst very shallow people, but everywhere else there's a large amount of discussion about the particulars of beliefs
@FirstNameLastName-okayyoutube I mean... I have no idea, I didn't write it.
They did a FANTASTIC job of making the entire province of Skyrim believable. It is one of the few video game worlds that trick my brain into thinking it could be or is a real place. Sure the cities are scaled down due to hardware limitations and the scale is 1:10 of what lore-accurate Skyrim is (also due to hardware limitations) but they more than made up for both of those by making what is there believable and realistic. It doesn't feel like a gam pretending to be real life. Too many games you can see behind the curtain so to speak, things don't add up, locations become uncanny valleys of "this sorta looks like a town, but my brain is telling me otherwise". The first-person POV of Skyrim also helps with immersion. I think they just got too ambitious and let the scale get beyond their means in Starfield. So we're left with an ocean 10000 miles across and 2mm deep. :(
Haelgas bunkhouse is one of my favorite filler buildings. It has nods to every character that lives there, its communal and offers random npcs a sense of self importance and community.
Imagine if you had to deal with some sort of water barons extorting the people, then the lack of a water source turns from a overlooked mishap to a functioning plot device to either further the player being good or evil in their playthrough
A random RUclips comment is a much better writer than a billion dollar company can afford
This is gonna go over everyones heads
@@VerdiBleu-d7f That's literally part of the plot of Fallout 1...
They can't show that to a corporate board meeting... can you imagine how the suits would react to that... Though you gave a simple idea which would make the game immediately interesting, just because something will actually be happening. In Starfield nothing happens, and even if something happens people react like they are "not from this world".... I mean they don't care.... Starfield characters seem to be completely uninterested in what happens around them.
@@Slav4o911 to be fair people not caring about the world around them is very accurate to the real world today in many respects. But that is due to modern pscyhology and mind control tactics used to produce a docile nihilistic idiocracy by design. Which one could argue perhaps is the starfield future?
Nah I agree that Skyrim's cities are likeable & unique (at least the bigger ones) but realistic is a stretch imho
He's just using the word "realistic" where he should be using the word "believable"
@SecretlySeven Idk but it's almost the same thing and I'd still not say they're believable cuz the biggest city and capital doesn't even have 100 people.
@@aysseralwan That's scale. Solitude was the upper limit of what the engine could do in 2011. Remember what consoles the kids had in 2011. That is what determines the size of open world cities in games.
@SecretlySeven yeah, I understand that there are engine limitations but these limitations make it for me impossible to say any Elder Scrolls city is believable or realistic. I mean they can be immersive in a way but not as cities.
@@aysseralwanExcept for elder Scrolls 1 and 2 of course.
I just started another modded play through of Skyrim. Even after all these years it still holds up so well, especially with the help of some quality of life mods. Every place you go to makes sense, nothing feels like it there “just because”. Starfield on the other hand just doesn’t make sense in almost any way. I tried so hard to like it but the repetition killed me. I played for the dlc and never played it and never even came close to finishing the main campaign.
Skyrims cities are small because engine limitations but it’s also pretty historically accurate, the Nords are clearly based on the Scandinavian cultures and throughout history Scandinavia had rarely ever had large population centers. Even large cities like Stockholm were much smaller population wise compared to the rest of European cities.
This is something people forget when they criticize Skyrim cities. Skyrim cities are small and focused but they feel very real.
Scandinavia is not in Tamriel. Small population centers doesnt mean 10-20 people being the population of a whole region. Skyrim cities are small because Bethesda is shit at creating cities or most other things involving game development.
It’s not engine limitations, but just Bethesda using their radiant AI where NPCs all have set schedulers…doing this for 100s of NPCs would be a nightmare
It’s not realistic at all lol what are you talking about? Theres like 10 people in some villages, Dawnstar and Falkreath barely classify as villages.
Skyrim cities don't look anything like actual medieval Scandinavian cities nor did any proper city ever have a population of twelve, even the average village of the period would have had more people than all of Solitude. I love Skyrims cities but trying to say they are realistic in any regard is silly.
The first time you step into Whiterun will be a moment where you feel shivers. The sight of a lived-in civilisation just feels so good when there's people like the Battle-Born brothers and Eorlund Grey-Mane roaming and working away at their forges and competing for the title of best blacksmith, it just feels *alive.*
3:00 If there were wells, or some sort of technology showcased in the city that told us an immersive way these places accumulate water that would have been helpful to understand why people even live there. Take Star Wars for instance, in A New Hope, Luke's family were literally moisture farmers, a valuable resource of a barren desert world like Tatooine and it's an obvious profession, they used moisture collecting technology and machines to harvest water vapor. It's literally one of the first world building elements in the entire franchise. And Bethesda couldn't be bothered to explain Akila City and how it even sustains itself in such a basic way.
Love the critique. Starfield's cities give off theme park vibes, where everything is just there for the player on a surface level, while not actually functioning as cities. The shops don't close, there are no entertainment options, and there's a dearth of memorable people to interact with.
Some writers and artists like to use the future as a cop out to simplify and avoid a fleshed-out design. Why build a city here?.. "it's the future!"
Ok i will say that there is a reason Solomon Coe set up Akila city there
During the main storyline with Sam Coe
When you are looking for the artifact he explicitly States that his grandfather Solomon Coe set up akila city where it is because it was a dead zone of energy (because of the artifact) and so it was hard for the UC to spot them and also a lot of the dangerous animals didn't want to go near that place, so it was safer than other spots
I will acknowledge this comment because it does answer a question in the video, but the issue here is that it adds more questions than answers.
For example, why was the dead zone seemingly more important than immediate access to a basic human need? Wouldn't a dead zone also be cause for the UC to be more curious about an area and investigate it for themselves? And if the nearby artifact was supposedly keeping the wildlife away, why did the city have to have a wall in the first place?
It's just bad worldbuilding, but thanks for leaving a good comment
@@Acex2ron hang on, now you mention that, is this a bit of a plot hole?
Because the dead zone scares off animals, and it's created by the artifact, wouldn't removing the artifact remove the dead zone? And doing so wouldn't let the wildlife roam back into the area?
Actually would make a good plot point about how your quest accidentally causes a disaster that you might need to resolve, but Bethesda seemed to forgot about the point they raised 5 minutes earlier.
Also in all that time, no one ever actually found the source of the disturbance, despite having a map to it, and it sitting in a cave that's about 5 minutes walk from the city center?
@@jampine8268 The dead zone doesn't even reach the city, it's basically only the crater that holds the mouth of the cave, and if you talk to the leader of the bandits who live in the cave, they'll say that the animals will be after them if you take the relic, and then they try to kill you.
I agree that Skyrim is way more immersive than most modern open world games today. I liked that the NPCs handily scheduled tasks and did small talk when you pass by. Other games I have played the NPCs were just quest focused or bunch of robots to make world look busy.
A lot of towns in the American West were built around naturally occurring springs, where groundwater came to the surface- no large body of water required.
okay but where is Akila's Groundwater spring? If there was like a building at or near the center of town that was like, a groundwater processing plant, it would make sense, but afaik, no such building exists.
@averyodowd6448 I dunno about Akila specifically, never played the game. Just thought it bore mentioning as it seemed like an overconfident assumption that any settlement would have to be located near a large body of surface water.
My biggest flaw with starfield immersion is you don’t really see anyone working/ sleeping eating etc. you just see a bunch of npc kind of existing.
Shops don’t have a day night schedule. Npc just sit in-front of monitors.
In Skyrim the there were markets npc interactions other npc visiting shops everything in starfield os just stark and empty and feels like place holders
NPC AI peaked in Oblivion.
While Skyrims Cities did have significant flaws and were very small, one of the main issues for me is that new Atlantis is meant to be a capital of a space civilisation, yet not only is it not that big- is is the only significant settlement in the entire planet- add to that the fact that all their other planets are basically empty and you’ve got a world that feels unbelievable form the off. At least Skyrims cities sustained a solid base level of believability- despite significant flaws- such as tiny farms for example.
Is it true that there's an invisible wall on the edge of the map of every planet?
If the next elder scrolls have massive cities filled with no name NPC's and houses you cant enter but are way bigger, I would see that as a loss. Other games have that and does that well, but the Elder Scrolls is unique in the kind of interactivity you get in their cities, albeit small. Though I think with Bethesdas budget they could and should probably still scale them up somewhat. But at this point i have little faith in them.
I'd have been fine with some semi randomised NPC's. Make a computer roll a dice to pick an upbringing, two or three memories and a personality archetype, from a few hundred options (resulting in millions of potential combinations) assign them a family and a career then automate a schedule. Add a few details depending on your rolls like things they would have in their house, if they are late/early to work etc and I would be very happy.
Obviously, important characters would be entirely handcrafted but the above system should allow you to quickly fill a few districts with named personality holding NPC's. Probably the biggest cost would be in voice actors, I reckon you'd need at least 50 to record a lot of different lines to make it feel believable (same amount as Skyrim, but probably more contexts needed).
You only THINK they could scale them up? Remember that Morrowind had Mournhold and Oblivion had Imperial City and New Sheoth. They absolutely have the budget to make bigger cities, but Starfield just proved that Bethesda doesn't give a f* and wants to release a half finished product, with the other half being overpriced CC microtransactions.
I don't mind the cities from Starfield not really feeling equipped to handle being self-sufficient because you need to remember that in that universe, transporting materials from one star system to another is as simple as driving five minutes down the street so having all of their society spread out so far does not really hold them back with how space travel works for them
Starfield is the least immersive Bethesda game for me because of the cities and the general lack of creativity in the lore
It's like literally every aspect of the game is purpose built to prevent immersion from building. And not just the constant loading screens. The entire setting and world building is so un-immersive it's almost an achievement.
as soon as they said the story wouldn't be about aliens i immediately knew it was likely gonna be a snoozefest
The Rift isn't the hold that harbours Lake Ilinalta. That's Falkreath Hold. The Rift has Lake Honrich instead (where Goldenglow Estate is).
the fact that in Skyrim the shopkeepers lock them until they open again in the morning gives it so much more life, makes it feel like they are real people too.
Yeah, but where do Skyrim rivers start from?
Horker piss and Salt water💪🏼
Some unnamed hillside off map lmao
Lakes, melting snow from the mountains, and waterfalls springing from underground sources. There's a whole video about it by Any Austin and it's not that bad.
You know the game is Timeless is when It's still better to some games released nowadays. I dont think Bethesda can capture such a cultural game like Skyrim is. Despite it having a Sequel in the next coming of years. I just hope it delivers.
This reminds me of how much time you can spend at the start of a game of Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress just choosing where you want to embark, taking into account the climate, resources, dangers, and geographic location to other things, because those are all important things to consider when building a settlement. Bethesda clearly never took a single one of those things into consideration when making Starfield.
Skirim: has cities with 10 people, everyone with a single line of dialogue.
Everybody here: wow, so immersive.
It is tho 🤷
@gadgetselec4153
2 quick questions and i'm very open to listen every opinion:
How in the world something this approximative (small places, dumb economics, 99% of the people you meet are bandits or guards, ecc) can fell immersive to you?
If all the people you know in real life start repeating one single sentence from now on every time you walk near them, you will not think something is really off?
@@giacomo8875 I'm wasting my time on you: no one thinks about this when consuming entertainment , if it's good enough it's immersive, compared to other videogames Skyrim is immersive
@gadgetselec4153 is me the one who is losing time on you because i tried to argument my point in a civilized manner but you just proven you lack the courage to accept a fact that the majority of the players of this game are well aware of, you are not disproving anything i say, you are only capable of arguing like a child.
A game is immersive until it fail to be, and the things i said are big fails and are only three example i write on the spot, there are a lot, and every skyrim player know this very well.
But nobody in the word is stopping you to play this game for the next 12 years and killing nazeem for 300 times because he bully you.
This game is only immersive if you look on the surface, and by definition this can't be immersive, because they are distant opposite.
But why i'm loosing my time when i could argue like you do by saying "no it isn't🤗"?
Enjoy your game btw
As much as I want to agree with you and dunk on starfeild, your arguments are pretty weak. I grew up in a desert town that gets water from underground and it has no reason for being there other than people just settled down in that spot. No, the reason cities don't work in starfeild is because they don't feel realistic.
It can be a case when we look at moding project for older games, like Tamriel Rebuild.
Back then, there's instances in earlier developement where cities are bigger with clutters and generic npcs, but it only make it felt emptier with so many unnecessary distances between places. 'Modder megalomania' they said.
Then, they revisit those old places to make it tighter, smaller but most placements felt much more purposefull and fun to explore.
Something about city design not need to be big to feel 'immersive'.
I always sound crazy saying this but I think Starfield came 10-15 years too late. The culture at large has largely quit caring about "space exploration". That coupled with Starfield's lack of meaningful lore made sure the game was DOA
Akila City's water issue might be similar to Las Vegas, Nevada. While Lake Mead is relatively close (about 40 miles away), and is where Las Vegas now draws its water from, that wasn't always the case. Originally Las Vegas relied on a series of underground springs to sustain its population. If you look at Vegas in Google Maps, the point it marks (well into the center of the metropolitan area) is roughly where the Spring Mounds were. Las Vegas was founded in 1905 where the technology to access that water would be no where near what the Freestar Collective would be able to utilize. I don't see an issue with Akila City utilizing underground water easily.
However, it is still weird that they would choose to found the city there instead of somewhere with easier access. Las Vegas was settled where it was as it was the center point for the railroads between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, making it a perfect resupply stop. My only guess was that Solomon Cole had been mentioned as studying the gravitational anomalies we know to be the artifacts. With Akila City adjacent to one such anomaly. Perhaps that is why he chose to settle there? I believe it is also mentioned the gravitational anomaly helps keep some of the wildlife at bay, so perhaps Akila City is one of the safer spots on the planet. It would be nice if it was detailed a bit more in the game, like at the Akila City museum, instead of having to speculate.
I can also suspend my disbelief a bit more with a fantasy setting that is also a bit medieval in a sense. Built for the purpose of survival and having small businesses and economies. That and I can walk over every inch of the towns in Skyrim seamlessly for the most part.
Starfield however has an issue with cities where they feel so small because you can’t walk over every part of them and need to use loading screens to even go to other parts of the city in general.
And yeah the other things you brought up also make sense.
If you pay close attention in the game, you’ll find out that Solomon Coe founded that settlement because it was close to the anomaly that he discovered. It becoming the capital of the free star collective happened way after his time.
Also in the game, there’s technology to extract water from the atmosphere.
I suspect the reason why Starfield's cities aren't built with the same considerations as the cities in Skyrim is "We have technology":
○ no water - haul it from somewhere else;
○ no land for agriculture - hydroponics or some other sci-fi solution;
It seems the Skyrim team did a proper job in researching how cities in the medieval times developed, but how would an advanced civilisation with interstellar travel capabilities would develop its frontier cities? Who know, they'll probably solve their problems with advanced technology. But many games feature people from advanced civilisations stranded on other worlds, or even just outside of our normal one, struggling to survive in the same way we did centuries ago.
If that's the case, why didn't they show it? I would have loved to see what creative solutions they would have come up with, but instead there's just nothing...
@BetaDude40 Because it's faster and, more importantly, cheaper to not show it. Given how everyone complains of how empty the maps are, maybe they should have done this, than making huge, but empty maps.
Whiterun Hold is also - plains, vast plains. Whiterun city is strategically placed on a tall hill, where you could observe unobstracted enemy's approach from afar
7:16 Riften isn’t near Lake Ilinalta lol
Did you just mention Civ once and then play Civ music for the whole video? You're making me want to play Civ lol
Since when do skyrims cities feel realistic?
23:43 There are examples of buildings and locations like this in starfield too. I stumbled upon New Homestead while exploring the solar systems organically, and it was PACKED with lore and little mini quests and felt very lived in. Starfield is very hit or miss with its settlements but New Homestead and a few others like it were done right
Sorry but Night City is by far the fakest open world I've ever been in. Sure, it looks gorgeous, but the NPCs do not actually behave there, they're just spawned. It has all the A without the I.
Also a single goddamn cat in the whole of Night City. Even the streets are often empty during midday 😂
With regard to Constellation not fitting properly into New Atlantis. In the files for Starfield, along with concept art for the game, it's possible to see that originally, the Lodge was meant to be on the Eye, and the Eye wasn't meant to be in orbit of Jemison. Instead Constellation was in the Delta Pavonis system. Files indicate that system was meant to be inhabited by a faction named "Lodge" and all the planets and moons in Delta Pavonis are named, despite nothing actually being there.
commenting for the algorithm,, love your video essays man!
Easy to rag on Starfield but it's one of the few games I've played where there are tons of named NPCs with multiple dialogue options and personal histories. The only other games that really do this on a big scale, are other Bethesda games
Even Bioware games don't have that. Maybe The Witcher does
You should play Kingdom Come Deliverance. The city's fells pretty similar to Bethesda
To be honest neither feel like real cities. It’s also REALLY hard to make a city feel real when you’re making either A) a massive city for a fantasy setting or B) a modern city. Both are just too big to make 1 to 1 for the most part. I think the only game that even got close in my opinion was Cyberpunk 2077. No other game makes a massive city feel believable because that’s how big real cities are. Starfield cannot do that for obvious reasons. Same thing for Skyrim, they could never have made whiterun or winterfell even feel like the lore city they’re based on
Cyberpunk's NPCs and many of the shops are not even interactable at all
@ I don’t care to interact with every single character. I would have liked more interaction similar to how red dead redemption is but to be honest I care more about the size of the city than that
What's good about Skyrim is that even if the cities are small, most of them can feel like home. For example after multiple playthroughs Riften always ends up being my main house/city because I feel as if I'm part of its inhabitants after playing for a while, while my brother would always end up living in Solitude. You get attached to the places.
On the bit about him talking about the absense of influential families in the UC's capital, is an unfortunate side effect of another aspect of the lore that starfield created about the UC.
Where within the world, it does hammer home that there's some kind of crappy things about the UC, where just being born within the UC doesn't mean you have UC citizenship. and you only obtain it through service to the UC, and it can vary from person to person based on their aptitude.
Which literally results in the fact that just being a child of a powerful UC citizen, doesn't mean you yourself have any benefits of that power. and almost by nature, the UC kind of creates this system where those with power, keep it, but don't pass it down generationally.
so there aren't really any influential families, because they don't operate that way.
There are individuals who have sway, and may get talked about because they have a leadership role. But no families or clans exist that have power within the UC, because they created a system that doesn't allow for a family to have that kind of sway.
Haven't played Stanfield and haven't watched the vid yet, just going off the title for the moment.
If Skyrim's "cities" feel more realistic than Starfield's then holy **** they _really_ dropped the ball on Starfield. Skyrim's cities are absolutely awful and among the worst in the entire TES series.
Oblivion?? have you seen the design of the Imperial city? how is THAT the seat for the empire!? Entrance so steep it's nearly vertical, steps so steep the player literally falls down, and no urban sprawl.
Skyrim doesn't have cities, just a few villages
Fallout 3 and Megaton: What do they eat?
Starfield and Akila: What do they drinkl?
We see a Brahmin in Megaton, I imagine it is sort of meant to suggest that they have a herd.
This is explained in the game if you look and ask around, Megaton salvages and trades parts and scrap to Rivet City which is a hub for experimenting with grown foods, thus Rivet City sends food there in exchange for salvage parts they need.
Now where exactly do they get the water from, they get that from unground water system, you do a mission there to save or destroy it. Megaton also appears to trade water with other places in game. So, Megaton is simply a trading centre for region, which would be correct if this game was real life.
A counterpart for Megaton, in our world would be Xian, China, a historical trade city on the silk road trade route.
What was the second city clip?? I mean from what game
skyrims cities do not feel realistic bro
A technological society does not have to situate itself near any resource. Cities on planet Earth and in any medieval fantasy have to do so because they are not developed enough for that to not be an issue anymore. But for people who arrived by spaceship, who'd have traveled dozens of lightyears to get there, arguing about a couple more miles on the planet surface is nitpicking.
Why is Akila city exactly there? Maybe because when Solomon Coe arrived advanced telemetry he wouldn't have had access to lightyears afar revealed that Akila is tectonically unstable, and they picked the best spot for that to be less of an issue.
Then there's the cultural aspect. You are comparing apples to oranges, society didn't EVOLVE where they settled in Starfield, an EVOLVED society settled these spots. The feeling of them just being where they are for no apparent reason comes from the fact that they as a technological society do not rely on being situated at the most advantageous spot their natural environment can provide for the multitude of needs less advanced societies would require to thrive on, so they do not integrate into that environment in any way a city established in the antiquity would, there is no historicity there... so you are pitting thousands of years of pre-industrial happenstance against hundred and thirty years of space colonization.
A technological society’s settlement choices are deliberate, informed by innovation, not driven by necessity or tradition. The cities in Starfield didn't *evolve* with their societies over thousands of years, they were *designed* by their societies who lived there less than a hundred fifty. Societies need several hundred years even if you look at Earth's history, to accumulate traditions, histories, and multifaceted identities tied to their surroundings. A hundred and thirty years is barely enough time for the settlers of that fresh new planet to adapt fully, let alone create a rich cultural tapestry. It wasn't until the 1700s, after two to three hundred years of colonization, conflict, and gradual development, that events in America began to leave an indelible mark on the cultural zeitgeist. Therefore your criticism based on such a minuscule timescale is as airy as you claim these cities to be.
I get it, I get it, Starfield has so many problems, most of the others were already discussed ad nauseam and are so glaring it's like shooting fish in a barrel, so you need a different topic of complaint. But this? Nah... it's a non-argument.
If a player doesn't end up questioning why a thing exists, that's all the "realism" a game needs. You are believing the lie and are checked in, that's what suspension of disbelief is.
Every time I went to Akila City it felt like it was some shitty outpost. The part that makes me hate it the most is all the dirt and mud roads. Really? A civilization that has Galaxy level influence and it has dirt roads in its capital still?
6:56 Maybe youre answering your own question here. Once they realized that a gold mining settlement in Akila wouldn’t feel differentiated enough from Cydonia, they could have scrapped that aspect. Still, I wonder if there’s a lore explanation for the settlement location
@ perfect thank you
Oblivion felt more alive than Skyrim.
Although incredibly small in scale to the lore, the cities of skyrim feel genuine, lively, believable and lived-in.
@grimvisionz91 not to me, i find hard to feel genuine an npc who always say the same two lines. The witcher team to me did a much better job
One of my problems with Starfield is the almost universal lack of past lore/history. In Skyrim you'll find HUGE books of lore from the 1st era down to current day. Hundreds of detailed journals (some in multiple parts) are placed in the world to give the quests context and history. Starfield has some data slates and computer log entries with a tiny bit of information, the actual books in game are all just a page or two of classic literature meant to trade off to the Akila bookseller. Something like "why Akila City wasnt placed near water" wouldn't happen in Skyrim, there would be an answer aomewhere in Skyrim lore, or at least some theories backed by lore.
How about the human fact that polluting people put their settlements near rivers.
Starfield is based upon knowledge of the sciences, and such information about Akilas choice is hidden in human history books. Like what you could find on your bookshelf or library today. Ask your local library or scholar on what kind of people chose in history to settle on rivers in humanity's lore.
Kinda like how you have to learn about how Argon in the game effects the player, after searching up about argon and finding that 1994 a person died just because of argon.
This just isnt true, theres a ton of lore in the game, but its in data slates. quests etc
@@qwertyvypez the game has Ghengis Khan and Franklin Roosevelt as well as NASA. It's using the - you go to the nearest library and learn some thing.
@@qwertyvypez There is nowhere near the amount of lore in Starfield! Skyrim has multiple volumes with pages and pages dedicated to ancient emperors like Pelagius and descriptions of how the province was conquered, lost and reconquered by the Nords. Yes, I get that our own history makes up part of Starfield's history, obviously, that's not what bothers me. But the amount of lore we receive in game for those missing years between today and the foundation of the settled systems is horrible. It's like giving a current events history lesson that says "In 1492 Columbus "discovered" the new world....and in 2025 SpaceX is planning a mission to Mars.". I'd say 90% of Starfield lore comes from the narrated museum exhibit on your way to the pilot simulator. That's not enough to keep me interested for long.
Morthol being a fly over state is such a fucking hilarious ass bar LMAOOOOO
Lmao, "Skyrim cities feel realistic", how did we get there, seriously... Y'all are so desperate for reactionary opinions that you're willing to shamelessly lie. Everyone has been rightfully criticizing and mocking Skyrim's cities for years and all of sudden they are great just so you can make a negative video about Starfield for clicks.
People in 2050: "Starfield 1 cities were much more realistic than Starfield 2🤓"
Imagine if people remembered Oblivion, makes both skyrim and starfailed look equally disappointing.
Excellent video, all great points.
Because named NPCs instead of randomly generated "Settler" and "Citizen" that change everytime you visit and never do anything.
Skyrim had """cities""" that had less people than a fucking hamlet during the Plague. They aren't realistic, we just had different standards back then. Even though I'm not really a fan of The Witcher 3, they made the cities and towns actually feel like it.
Starfield is the first step, on TES VI they will certainly use the scale of Starfield's cities and make it more detailed, more lived-in
No matter what Bethesda does (or not), trust that there is a crowd that will bitch and moan about it.
In no world do Skyrim’s cities feel realistic bro
No but they do feel alive. They have a history and culture for sure
Really love this vid and how well it’s put together!!! I can tell you put in a lot of time
It's fine in the Witcher 3 but not Starfield? Oblivion even had better cities and towns than Skyrim. Does GTA feel lifeless with all the nameless npcs?
Exactly
Witcher 3 did it soo much better that comparing it to Starfield is an insult. As always with Bethesda the problem isn't the core idea, but the lackluster execution.
I actually really hate that part of the Witcher 3 and GTA. I feel like I am playing in a post-apocalyptic dystopia full of random bots with no life or purpose that just till fields or stand by a crosswalk when playing those games. You can't interact with the NPCs, they say like 1-2 premade catchphrases at you.
Now Oblivion I do agree with, I love Oblivion. But the other two games suck soo much.
@Xalantor don't try and compare your horse manure 3 to Starships galore starfield.
@@LycanFerret how long do you think it would take you to make 10000 voiced npcs in starfield using creation kit guides by youtube channels: 510deshawn; & Jramosworks
One Issue I have with Cities in general is that often times they set up these cities as like THE BASTION OF CIVILIZATION and then you go there and its 5 houses and 2 stores.
Like how for example the Imperial Capital is a joke compared to the Lore of it.
And while I know the limitations, I can take it in Riverwood, some backwater village in skyrim not THE IMPERIAL CITY OF THE EMPIRE.
If there is a place for insane scale and thousands of nameless NPC, its those places.
But most Video games have either named NPCs and Routines, or only spawn in stuff.
I think Witcher and Novigrad did a good job, besides also having big events happen in the lore like half of the city burning down, etc.
Like how London basically dissappeared like 3 or 5 times in history before exploding in size.
I rather see this if the City is a joke.
Let the War with the Dominion be clearly seen, and make half of the city completly empty, just so it looks big.
But I find it hard to praise Skyrim Villages when even back in the day, were considered underwhelming.
Starfield just showed what happens if you take any interesting lore or characters out of the already no substance cities and just scale it up.
This is crazy bro 😂 When did Skyrim cities became 'realistic'?
I agree, he should have compared Elder Scrolls Online cities which were based on historical designs of real world cities.
@StacieMMeier Very true
It's so funny how they suddenly pretend Skyrim's cities were great just so they can make a negative comparison with Starfield. Reactionary bullshit at its finest. And then they defend Skyrim's cities by saying "they are obviously just smaller versions of a true city so it's okay", but following that logic you could say exactly the same to defend Starfield's cities...
about Akila City, it had a source of water until the drought that came sonewhere in 2200s
First time I have seen Skyrim cities being compared as the good example
Great video. I really like that you are not bashing Starfield and instead take a reflected look on it. Refreshing to see!
I have always felt the cities in Skyrim felt empty and uninhabited compared to other games like Mass Effect
Mass effect only has one city: the citadel
The Constallation Lodge is in New Atlantis so players dont have to travel to other planets when they want to buy or sell crap.
Plot Twist - they both feel fake and inauthentic.
Neither get it right, its just Starfield is far more egregious than Skyrim
Skrims cities have always felt small. But. They still felt alive. There was sth going on. You could interact with everything. Visit every house. Talk to every NPC. Things changed. People came and disappeared. Id always prefer a smaller city like Skyrims over a big city like Novigrad that acts merely as a background for the story to happen. Most houses are just facade. NPCs are just nameless randoms. I like that it feels bigger and louder yeah. But it feels like those old paintings. Sure theyre somewhat impressive but the longer you look at those old portraits the more unease you feel. Thats also why its hillarious when people always cry Unreal Engine blabla. First not every game with UE is next gen graphics. Second the games feel like plastic and fake ambience
I don't care how bad Starfield's cities are. I will never praise Skyrim's cities. Disappointing to see the bar set so low.
Then what's better??
@@BananaMango99 Previous Elder Scrolls games, for one. Vivec city comes to mind.
@@TheRealNeonwarrior Vivec City? the drab cantons that look nearly identical to each other? looks like something a 6-year-old would make in Spore. Vivec City doesn't look like it even fits the surrounding environment, but was just plopped down there because they had nowhere else to put it. Not saying Skyrim is like a flawless game, but seriously, Vivec City is better designed than anything in Skyrim?
“Do you get to the cloud district very often? Oh, what am I saying? Of course you don't.”
If you think skyrims cities feel realistic you should play kingdom come deliverance
The point was comparing two games by the same company. Also, the title should probably have been "immersive", not "realistic".
@Br3ttM if you think skyrims cities are immersive you should play king come deliverance
@ Read the first half of my comment, not just the second half.