Starfield has just launched a new patch into its beta that adds some legitimately useful quality of life elements, difficulty toggling, ship decoration, inventory tabs, actual city and surface maps. Later, it will add vehicles. But I’m most excited about this new update, which they’re calling Starfield: Visions:
- Discover a more varied, more diverse universe in the Visions update. Introducing new planetary biomes, more colorful worlds, new fauna and flora, archaeology, salvaging, and much more…
- New anomalous planet biomes create a weirder, more diverse universe to explore.
- Bizarre creatures have evolved on anomalous planets, bringing new life and movement to these eerie landscapes.
- The universe has become more alien, vibrant and exciting to explore. New shades of sky and grass enable more unique worlds and a more diverse set of science fiction aesthetics.
- New types of water create stranger worlds to be discovered both above and below the surface.
- Atmospherics and skies have been improved and stormy weather conditions can now produce rainbows in planetary atmospheres.
- Exotic planets can be searched to discover mysterious artifacts which can be claimed as trophies. These otherworldly objects can be rehoused in habitable bases to create a showcase of your voyages across the universe.
- With more varied planets come more reasons to explore. Unleash your inner archeologist and search the galaxy for planets containing the ancient bones of alien lifeforms. Complete, intact skeletons are particularly rare and especially valuable.
Oh I’m sorry, that was a typo. I mean to say that was the No Man’s Sky Visions update, back from November 2018. But the point I’m trying to make is well, yeah, other than new missions and an expansion storyline, I think something like this is what Starfield needs the most.
No Man’s Sky has done update after update building out the game, but this is one that was attempting to get it back to the original missions of exploring cool planets that at launch, were pretty barren and often not very cool at all.
Starfield is at least ahead of where No Man’s Sky was at launch in this department as I think it often does have beautiful landscapes, but I think it would benefit from significant overhauls to its procedural generation systems to make these planets more interesting to explore, and give players a reason to go places they wouldn’t otherwise to find things they can’t predict, rather than landing anywhere and finding the same eight types of civilian or pirate bases spaced 500 meters apart.
The ultimate goal of Starfield, both conceptually from Bethesda and in-game when you join Constellation, is exploring the universe. But in doing so, you will find that probably 950 of Starfield’s promised 1,000 planets contain nothing of note, or at least nothing you haven’t seen before a dozen times already by the endgame. Every so often I’d find one thing maybe I didn’t see previously, but those instances became few and far between over time.
Starfield needs more interesting planets, both in terms of the visuals and biomes, but weather, flora, fauna and of course, POIs that need to be well beyond what it has now rather than as repetitive as they can be. I also like the NMS idea of rare trophies or relics to find as you explore, as the game doesn’t have anything crazily “rare” like that, and it would fit with base/ship decoration well.
I think at least in this specific area following No Man’s Sky, with a budget 10x higher at least, is a good plan. I mean hell, they’re already doing the No Man’s Sky land vehicle update, right?
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
