Starfields spaceship flying wont compete with No Mans Sky for one simple reason

Date:
Wed, 15 Jun 2022 16:00:43 +0000

Description:
Studio director Todd Howard says you won't be able to seamlessly fly between planets and space.

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Starfield looks to share a lot of characteristics with 2016s sci-fi survival game No Mans Sky (for better or worse ), with both offering massive procedurally generated universes to explore through interstellar travel. But Bethesdas upcoming space-based RPG will be missing one key feature of Hello Games slow-burning success: seamless starship piloting.

After revealing the first in-game footage of Starfield at the Xbox and Bethesda Showcase , studio director Todd Howard spoke to IGN about the game. During the discussion, Howard said the team has tried to implement many of
the ideas requested for the game, but the ability to seamlessly fly a
starship from a planets surface into space was left on the cutting-room
floor.

"People have asked, Can you fly the ship straight down to the planet? Howard said. No. We decided early in the project that the on-surface is one reality, and then when youre in space its another reality."

He went on to explain that the development time required to create such a feature wasnt justified. Dropping it allowed the team to focus its resources on other aspects of the game.

"If you try to really spend a lot of time engineering the in-between, like that segue, youre just spending a lot of time [on something] thats really
just not that important to the player," Howard said.

"So, lets make sure its awesome when youre on the surface and awesome when youre in space, and those realities look and play as good as they can be." Planetside interruptions (Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

That Starfield won't allow you to hop into a spaceship and manually take off into the final frontier will be disappointing to some fans. There was hope
the game would match the scope of other spacefaring adventure games released in recent years.

No Mans Sky , in particular, has received much praise for immersing the player in its wide universe by minimizing gameplay interruptions. When you come across a planet in the belly of space, youre able to pilot your ship through its atmosphere, before coasting above its surface and initiating a landing procedure to drift downwards. No cutscenes or loading screens; the player keeps full control.

How spaceship landing will play out in Starfield remains to be seen. Howard didnt specify whether it'd be an on-rails system, if there were any landing maneuvers youd need to control, or if its taken entirely out of your hands,
as the game simply switches to the planetside view through a loading screen.

Starship piloting wont be entirely absent from the game, however. The
gameplay clip released during the Summer Game Fest showed off Starfields spaceship dogfighting, which lets you blast enemy vessels as you career
around the great expanse.

Elsewhere in the interview, Howard gave an update on Fallout 5 . Starfield
has been a long time coming, but it's behind in the space race



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/starfields-spaceship-flying-wont-compete-with-n o-mans-sky-for-one-simple-reason/


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