Starfield, Bethesda's Space RPG Spectacular

[Typhonis]

The game is a huge cocktease because its like "There WAS this super awesome war with mechas you could've been playing, but can you just be a space mailman for me please lmao?"

 

[S'task]

So, essentially, what is the quintissentially Californian technology industry view of the next 80 years or so?

This here is a core problem with this idea. Bethesda isn't part of the California Tech Bubble. It's on the opposite side of the continent, it's part of the Acela/DC Bubble, which while it's just as technocratic isn't quite as militantly secular as California is. It's also a lot more politically aware in many respects, which is why I think that they also made Freestar.

If you look at Freestar you'll note it's two main worlds in some respects are idealized forms of Libertarianism, and not Left Libertarianism either. Cheyenne pretty explicitly is Space!Texas and the entire Freestar is modeled on what amounts to Conservative / Libertarian governmental ideas. It's also the faction that has Mechs... so clearly someone at Bethesda felt that ideals of Freedom and such would make it out into space.

 

[willdelve4beer]

This here is a core problem with this idea. Bethesda isn't part of the California Tech Bubble. It's on the opposite side of the continent, it's part of the Acela/DC Bubble, which while it's just as technocratic isn't quite as militantly secular as California is. It's also a lot more politically aware in many respects, which is why I think that they also made Freestar.

If you look at Freestar you'll note it's two main worlds in some respects are idealized forms of Libertarianism, and not Left Libertarianism either. Cheyenne pretty explicitly is Space!Texas and the entire Freestar is modeled on what amounts to Conservative / Libertarian governmental ideas. It's also the faction that has Mechs... so clearly someone at Bethesda felt that ideals of Freedom and such would make it out into space.

Oh, no argument there.

I was doing a thought experiment on why no real world religions seem to exist in Starfield. The UC being full bore technocratic fascist seems indisputable. That they ran the evacuation seems universally agreed.

That the explanation was also intended to come up with a rationale why Sarah (UC loyalist at heart) considers the Evacuation successful, while Sam (Freestar loyalist) focuses on billions left to die, and have them both be correct (from their point of view) and speaking to same underlying set of facts .

Everything else was just trying to riff off those points in a way that wouldn't conflict with the nomad miners concept from the prior post that is just amazing.

 

[Typhonis]

I expect that there was also one last war that no one wants to talk about. A last gasp as the elites and others realize, "Hey I'm not going to be on top. Why should these assholes be on top?"

Nukes fly. A few launch areas get hit. People scatter as some feel that it would be better to die fighting than waste away needlessly. In the aftermath, Earth was on its way to dying even faster as old grudges came to the fore and the UC said 'Fuck this' and did a full burn out of there.

Think I'm wrong? During the Cold War, the Soviets had nuclear weapons pointed at neutral countries so that if they were ever hit. No country would escape unscarred from the exchange.

 

[JagerIV]

The game is a huge cocktease because its like "There WAS this super awesome war with mechas you could've been playing, but can you just be a space mailman for me please lmao?"

I'm always a bit amazed that the Bethesda future space game has less mecha and robots than their post apocalyptic 1950s America game. Hell, there doesn't seem to even be any level on the level of the Call of Duty Space game. Do people remember that robot level?

@willdelve4beer

I think it makes more sense for the very unitary UC government, if that is how its actually supposed to be, rather than just a lack of content on them, to be a product of the colonial government/evacuation.

Whatever you think of current direction, militant consolidated service focused would not be how I'd describe it. Multi national Corporate doesn't have any reason to like an ideal of service, since it puts them in a subservient position and leaves them no levers to pull. Corporate I think would prefer regulators and judges to have to operate against, giving them a lot of levers to pull semi automatously, rather than a single powerful leader that can say yes or no. See the DeSantis situation. A complex web of overlapping judicial, state, regulatory, jurisdictional, moral authorities to confuse merit and blame. In a rich, decadent system, lack of accountability is great for those in positions to exploit the ambiguity, but because things are rich, such inefficiencies doesn't kill that many people, and certainly doesn't threaten the system as a whole.

Think for example of the Iraq War or 2008 financial crisis: terrible mistakes were made, much was lost, very few were held to account, but in the end it didn't destroy anything. It didn't matter how good or bad the generals were, because losing a $1 trillion dollars to achieve nothing was still a drop in the bucket against the immense amount of wealth. Thus, a lack of accountability didn't matter that much, certainly not as much as in more desperate situations, say WWII. A general allowed to squander resources on the scale we did in Iraq against the Germans would have had disasterous consequences.

Thus, it makes more sense that the 2100s would be our cyberpunk dystopia: Say 80% of the population are worthless gang bangers playing at being tough guys, but if that other 20% are hyper efficient types keeping the automated factories running with a per capita productivity of $100k, well then a world of 10 billion with 2 billion productive people and 8 billion worthless eaters would still be a world with 2x the current global GDP, and an average GDP of $20,000, twice the current per capita.

This would not be in the case of space: your not in a situation of abondance: people need to have clear jobs, a clear chain of command, and incompetents have to be removed.

You also have a lot less bloat. How large does a research colony get before they need a dedicated court and an elected representative body? What about a mining colony, where everything is owned by a megacorporation and theoretically everyone is on 2 year rotations off world before returning home.

If the colony is founded by an Earth organization to achieve a particular purpose, the Earth owner is likely not overly eager to create a local parliament or Judge that can over rule the organizations desires for the company. And if Elon Musk founds his Mars colony, I'm not sure he would be particularly thrilled to hand over power to courts or parliaments.

With the disaster on Earth, and the colonists having some forewarning of this since they're actions causing it, this was the chance for the colonists to impose their morality on the decadent Earth society.

Thus, in a way, the two opposing factions, sorta, are actually both traditionalists: the Freestars are people recapturing the frontier independence habitable worlds allowed, a kind of culture not supported by classical vacuum world or space existence. The rugged individual is something possible in lands of abondance with plenty of space. Neon meanwhile is the holdover of the cyberpunk dystopia culture that the UC purposefully stamped out.

Thus, Freestar pursues the rural ideal of freedom: the rugged, self sufficient individual. Neon pursues the urban ideal of freedom: an individual surrounded by endless choice and opportunity, an anything goes, do what you want to do kind of atmosphere. Freedom from, vs freedom to.

UC meanwhile is a rejection of that focus on Liberty at all, and is instead focused on Duty and survival. A sort of "spartanism", as described here:

The Tilted Political Compass, Part 2: Up and Down

While liberalism is easy to identify I struggle with what to call this. I rejected "authoritarianism" as a label in part 1 because hardly anybody is "authoritarian" for its own sake, and I stand by that. Let's see what else we can get.

"Coupled" and "survive" certainly paints a picture. The world is a tough, unforgiving place and we need discipline to navigate it. Open-ended obligations means you can expect to be helped and supported by everyone else — as long as you contribute and conform. We're a team and you're a team player. That's important, because supporting that kind of cohesion on a large scale requires constant work towards unity. Not surprisingly, this quadrant contains a lot of rhetoric comparing the state to a family, evoking feelings of unbounded support, loyalty and duty.

By serendipity I happen to be reading Bertrand Russell's The History of Western Philosophy as I'm writing this, and I note that the description of ancient Sparta is a perfect match for the top corner — especially the way it's neither left nor right. Sparta was militaristic, extraordinarily tough-minded, masculine and with an oppressed serf class, but they also insisted on equality among citizens (and somewhat between the sexes), they hated money, trade and consumerism and aggressively fought accumulation of wealth, and even separated families to practice collective child rearing. Spartan politics were clearly coherent — as coherent as liberalism — but not an extreme endpoint on a left-right spectrum.

There have been versions of "Spartanism", but the pure form only really came back in full force in the West with modernity and mass society, after industrialization, urbanization and World War I showed what performance civilization-as-fossil-powered-machine is really capable of[5]. That was fascism, which could have worked as a descriptor for this quadrant had it not been turned into a contentless term of abuse. The real, historical fascists believed in something like Spartanism. Internal order was paramount and everyone's duty towards the collective and its institutionalized form (the state) was essentially limitless. They also thought of themselves, justifiably, as an economic "third way" beyond left and right[6].

It makes sense to put them directly opposite liberalism and between left and right because much of their ideology was a direct rejection of liberal principles but has clear points of contact with both leftism and rightism[7]. Fascism as far-rightism is well-trodden ground. They both agree that competition and the cultivation of competence and strength are absolutely essential for the health of society, making them suspicious of anything that sounds weak, whiny or trivial. With the left they share a distaste for selfishness, instrumentality and the quasi-sociopathic virtuelessness of the market, and agree that it is everyone's duty think more of the whole than to satisy their own personal desires.

This seems to make sense as the philosophical basis for the UC. "Unity, Duty, Humanity" could easily be the watchwords of the UC.

Freestar in comparison is pretty solidly in the right of this model:

Putting "decoupled" and "survive" together yields the right. Here everybody is responsible for themselves and their loved ones only. You have your list of rights and obligations but anything more is strictly over and above what is required. Civilization is kept running by the productive and thus being productive must be rewarded and being unproductive or even destructive must be punished or at the very least not supported or society will stagnate or worse. You'll suffer the consequences of your own mistakes and misfortunes because you must learn to improve, be an example to others — and because nobody else is obligated to clean up after you.

"We're not rich enough" plus "limited, enumerated obligations" produces a skepticism of social programs deemed overly ambitious, intrusive, coddling or frivolous. The solution to poverty is the production of more wealth, which requires incentivizing the productive — the disciplined, smart, self-sufficient and responsible — to do so. Restrictions on behavior is mostly in service of cultivating these traits.

Neon, with a bit more fleshing out, could be where he puts "liberal", unbound freedom in the context of a thrive mentality.

To be liberal is to be live and let live. It means acceptance of difference and of pluralism of thought, feeling and action as legitimate and not as a problem to be suppressed. It means tolerance in its classical meaning: accepting the existence of what you'd rather see gone.

Liberalism stands opposed to authoritarianism, naturally. But not just that. It also opposes a communitarianism where your individual needs, wants and rights are subordinate not to the duties attached to your place in a hierarchy, but to the needs and wants of the rest of the community. To be liberal is to strive for everyone's self-authorship, self-determination and freedom from involuntary obligations, towards either the better off or the worse off.

That opens up a lot of questions about priorities, but this brand of liberalism is less of a full political philosophy than an attitude: profound skepticism towards all restrictions of individual autonomy, whether in the service of stability, efficiency, safety, harmony or equality.

For example, a certain level of fighting poverty through government action is fine, but for liberals, as opposed to leftists, it's for "thrive reasons": it increases self-determination on the whole and in a wealthy society we can afford it without imposing too much of a burden on people (especially if the duties are clearly circumscribed and as unintrusive and impersonal as possible[1]). It's not because we're fundamentally obligated to make substantial sacrifices for strangers, i.e. "coupled reasons". In this view, a social safety net is not a right, it's a privilege — but a privilege we ought to be generous about granting when we're lucky enough to live in a fabulously wealthy society[2].

The left I'm not sure in this measure could exist as a separate system on its own, outside some external source of wealth, but its an opponent to the other three, and could either be a moderating or villainous force, depending on how extreme the other examples are and how extreme of a left the rebels are:

The UC's left could argue you can have unity without duty.

The Freestar's left argue for more unity and more generosity.

Neon's argue a responsibility for the rich to the poor, and a spreading of wealth.

 

[Iconoclast]

The core game here has a lot of fundamental flaws. There are a lot of things that I, personally, would have done differently, from a design perspective.

Spoiler: Giant Bulleted Starfield Wish List

• First of all, I would have shitcanned Gamebryo/Creation, with its chugging cell transitions and general inefficiency, and gone with UE4.
• There would have been little to nothing in the way of loading screens. Maybe a slight hitch when entering detailed interiors, but that's it.
• Instead of being a collection of randomly-generated flat planes, the planets would have been actual spheres, like Space Engineers, KSP, No Man's Sky, Empyrion, Elite: Dangerous, Star Citizen, etc.
• Planets would not be background objects. As you got closer to them, there would be reentry effects, procedural terrain populated with POIs would appear, and you would be able to land manually on flat enough terrain.
• Planets would be 1:1 scale and millions of square kilometers.
• No invisible walls, period.
• No mandatory fast-traveling using the map, period.
• If you got beyond a certain distance from a zone, it would despawn, to avoid savegame bloat, however, due to the random seed, if you re-entered the same area, it would regenerate the same exact way. Cleared POIs would not respawn immediately; it would take a week of in-game time for them to repopulate with enemies. The way this would work is simple. If the player clears a POI, it sets an invisible flag that tells the engine "don't spawn enemies or loot in this circular zone". If the player fucks off elsewhere for a bit, the flag would eventually time-out and disappear from their save, and enemies and loot would spawn again.
• There would be HUNDREDS OF DIFFERENT POIs. The player would seldom see the same exact POI twice in a single playthrough.
• Atmospheric flight would be possible, but deliberately slow and clunky, to match how un-aerodynamic the ships are, encouraging the player to enter orbit to travel long distances, but ships would be perfectly capable of making short hops of a kilometer or two in a matter of seconds (their top speed in-atmosphere would be capped at about <200 m/s or so, and they would turn like boat anchors; it would feel less like conveniently flying a jet aircraft around, and more like the rocket-powered VTOLs from Highfleet; higher gravity would mean harder landings).
• Travel between planets and systems would NOT be accomplished by selecting them from a menu and fast-traveling. It would have been more like Elite, where you enter Supercruise and actually fly between planets without resorting to a cutscene transition.
• There would be ground vehicles.
  • There would be rocket-powered bikes, but they wouldn't be like speeders from Star Wars or the jet bikes from GTA or Saints Row. They would be more like rocket VTOL flying platforms that are more fuel tank and tubular frames than anything else, and flying them around would be kind of like playing Lunar Lander.
  • There would be tracked mini-tanks with machine guns.
  • There would also be power armor Exoframes, with extensive customization, like Fallout 4.
• You would be able to go on spacewalks with either your suit on, or with your power armor, by exiting an airlock or an Exoframe Bay.
• You would be able to board enemy ships while wearing power armor, but with a catch; you would need a specialized power armor bay and a drop pod launcher. Your pod would destructively pierce the enemy ship's hull and render it inoperable, and then you'd have to spacewalk back to your ship and re-enter via the power armor bay. You would only be able to loot the enemy ship's interior, not fly it around, due to the damage from the boarding.
• Drop pod launchers would also be perfectly capable of dropping you onto a planet from outside the atmosphere, with cool reentry effects.
• You would be able to call your ship in to land on autopilot (or have your crew pilot it) to pick you up, if you were separated from your ship for any reason (like No Man's Sky).
• You would be able to heavily customize robot followers like in Fallout 4's Automatron DLC.
  • Botmaster builds centered on siccing robot followers on enemies would be viable.
• There would be extensive cybernetic augmentations; not just neuroamps, but full-on prosthetic limbs with different attributes and such.
• If you sustained sufficient injuries in combat, your limbs could be amputated by an enemy attack, like in Kenshi. If you run into some space pirate with a big-ass gun, he absolutely could blow your leg clean off your body and force you to apply a tourniquet and crawl back to your ship half-dead.
• There would be nasty Gears of War-ish executions that you could perform on crippled or downed enemies, but they could also do the same to you if you're downed/crippled.
  • A Crimson Fleet asshole could come right up to your flailing ass with your leg shot off, kick the gun out of your hand, taunt you, and execute you in a gory cinematic second-person camera turnaround.
  • Enemies in video games are more interesting when you're actually given a reason to hate their guts, because they make it personal. Take the Zirax from Empyrion, for instance. They actively hunt you down. They send drones and troop transports to blow up your base. Every POI raid is a harrowing experience. You actually grow to despise them and just plain want to exterminate them from every corner of the universe.
• Location-based damage would work both ways, of course. In other words, it would be much like Fallout 4 (except with the added twist of de-limbed players/enemies surviving with a bleed-out effect).
• Enemies would have levels and perks and such, but there wouldn't be any special Legendary Enemies that are extra bullet-spongy minibosses. All human characters would be on a level playing field, and you'd be able to judge their combat effectiveness just by seeing what armor they're wearing and what weapon they're holding. The bullet sponge enemies would pretty much exclusively be monsters.
• The enemy AI would be way, way smarter and more aggressive to compensate. They would actively and intelligently make use of cover, aggressively push up on wounded or reloading players, make effective use of grenades, and be aware of their friendlies and coordinate assaults with them.
• There would be no loot rarity system or legendary effects. Every gun and piece of armor would have a fixed tier instead of that Diablo colored loot tier bullshit (i.e. Gun X is Gun X, there isn't a Magic Super Slaughterer Epic 12-Gauge Shotgun you can get in the endgame that does 10x as much damage as one you get near the start of the game).
• The player wouldn't be railroaded into wearing an ugly piece of armor with weak stats just because it has a few legendary effects on it, or forgoing the bonus to wear armor with better baseline stats but common tier.
• To compensate, there would be a much larger variety of weapons and armor, and their stats would correspond with their appearance.
  • "High-tier" guns wouldn't be high tier by virtue of being leveled or having loot rarity. Instead, a gun that does several times more damage than a regular anti-materiel rifle would be a visually oversized, heavier, rarer weapon that fires like 25mm cannon rounds or something.
  • Any bonus stats that could be applied to armor or weapons would be applied by modding/crafting only.
  • Weapon mods would be true-to-life. It wouldn't be ArmA-level realistic, but it wouldn't be counterfactual, either. Mods that lighten weapons would increase recoil, not decrease it, for instance. Also, each mod would only affect the stat that makes sense for that particular attachment. (Comps/Brakes would only affect kick, not accuracy. Barrel lengths would realistically affect muzzle velocity. Barrel profiles would affect accuracy. A big drum magazine would actually decrease recoil by increasing weight, etc.).
• There would be optional, fully-functional survival mechanics where you would absolutely need food and water and have limited fuel for your ship, Exoframe, vehicles, and boost pack.
• All of the un-fun bullshit inventory management would be completely stripped out. Crafting resources would be weightless like Cyberpunk 2077, subject only to a numeric cap.
• Resource containers in outposts would not have their own chest-like inventories. They would simply increase the numeric cap of the resource stockpile accessible to the player, while the player is standing within the outpost's area of effect.
• There would be none of this nonsense of linking containers together manually or having outpost link pads pile up with excess resources. If you build an outpost link, it would automatically link the stockpiles of all the outposts in the system (or in the game, with the inter-system ones), and you would gain access to all your other stockpiles immediately (i.e. outposts would instantly and invisibly share their stockpiles and resource caps, without any shuffling of weighted items around between containers; it would be abstracted and stress-free).
• You would be able to build resource containers on your ships, but these would only be for mining resources with your ship or moving resources in bulk to sell. They would be separate from the cargo containers used to carry loot, misc items, products, etc.
• If you didn't have such containers on your ship, your resource inventory would be limited to just your character's cap, and you would be restricted to hand-mining.
• The character resource cap could be increased with perks.
• You would be able to modify your ship with specialized asteroid mining, gas extraction, and liquid extraction equipment, and you would be able to land your ship directly on top of resource fields and extract them directly to the bulk resource containers on your ship.
• All ground chests would be infinite, to allow players to easily and conveniently dump excess cargo so they aren't forced to turn their ships into massive freighters just to carry a few hundred guns around that they have no way to quickly get rid of.
• There would be a reverse-engineering system where you could take weapons and armor to the workshop, break them down, and, eventually, receive blueprints.
• You would be able to manufacture any weapon or armor piece in the game yourself, from raw materials, so long as you had the blueprints. This would help give outposts a purpose.
• There would be a lot more outpost building prefabs to plunk down. You could practically build a luxury house in the middle of nowhere.
• You could also turn outposts into settlements, removing them from your outpost cap but also removing them from your direct control and having settlers live and work in them autonomously. Essentially, these locations become trade posts you can always visit and pick up rent money/radiant quests from.
• New Atlantis and Akila would both have been about five times larger, and the tram ride would let you stand inside the tram and watch the scenery go by.
• NPCs would be more reactive, instead of not even giving a shit about you discharging a firearm at their feet.
• NPC headtracking of the player in crowds would not be nearly as aggressive.
• Characters wouldn't look like waxy friggin' Madame Tussaud's sculptures.
• The subtitles would have actually 100% matched the dialogue and wouldn't be ridden with typos.
• Ships would not be arbitrarily limited to being <80m long. Instead, there would have been starport facilities for larger ships, and the largest of ships would have to use flat terrain outside a city instead of landing at the starport. Instead of your ship size being limited by infrastructure, it would just limit where you can land.
• You absolutely would be able to build a massive 300+ meter long capital ship and populate it with dozens of crew members (the crew cap would not be set by a perk, but solely by how many control stations there are on a ship).
  • All ships would be tail-sitters instead of belly-landers.
  • There would be realistic orbital mechanics.
  • There would be realistic Newtonian space combat like I-War or Children of a Dead Earth where you can overshoot an enemy and end up kilometers off-target.
  • Oh god, I just want a real Expanse game.
• Every hab module on your ship would be functional and have a purpose. Infirmaries would be used for treating the wounded, science labs would allow you to actually examine plant and animal samples and make discoveries, etc.
• For those wanting a more viable pacifist/humanitarian route, there would have been an entire faction dedicated to search-and-rescue missions, where your goal would be to answer distress calls, fix people's ships, evacuate stranded people and treat their injuries, etc.
  • There would be an Exoframe attachment with a welder specifically for doing spacewalks around stranded ships and repairing them by hand.
  • You would also be able to do this to your own ship.
• Ships would not be repaired by using a consumable from the cockpit. They would only be manually repairable either by walking around them on the ground and going over the damage by hand with a welder, going on a spacewalk and doing the same, or flying them to a technician and paying a fee. However, to compensate, shields would have much shorter recharge delays, such that shields are not one-and-done damage buffers that are depleted at the start of a fight and never regenerate, but can actually regenerate mid-battle.
• Even smaller ships would still be combat-viable in dogfights, with sufficient skill.
• There would be much larger space battles with dozens of ships flying around.
• There would be a Risk-style political map and an invasion system akin to Mount & Blade.
  • Players would be able to take part in faction invasions to seize territory from pirates, spacers, et cetera, which would turn over territory to the invading faction, if successful.
  • You could join the UC or FC and raid enemy strongholds for them as part of recurring radiant quests for money, but there would also be a player faction and you would be able to plot invasions, hire mercs (or bring along your own followers as a group) and seize territory for yourself.
  • These missions would involve squad-based combat where you have at least a dozen followers and have to tackle big, well-defended enemy strongholds with lots of sentry guns. They would have an artificially raised follower cap, in the sense that once an invasion is planned, you would meet up with everyone you sent on the invasion and they would all follow you around, but only within a certain distance of the objective (no dragging a dozen followers elsewhere).
  • Invade enough strongholds in key locations, and you can take over a whole planet.
  • Taking over a planet will reduce the number of raids on your outposts and settlements and confer various other productivity bonuses, if it's your own faction, or confer a flat monetary reward and increased favors from the established factions if you helped them with one of their invasions.
  • Factions would try to reclaim lost territory, and you'd be able to repel enemy invasions, too.
  • The invasion mechanic would also apply to space stations and space battles.
• There would be a real economy with fluctuating prices, and players would actually have an incentive to make and sell manufactured goods for profit. You could play Starfield like it was X3:TC or Avorion if you wanted to.
• Players would be able to build stations from modules, up to and including their own staryard.
• There would be an entire questline centered around the player going into business as a shipbuilder, with Walter mentoring you at first, but then perhaps growing envious of your success partway through depending on your choices, but then coming back around to respecting you as a competitor, etc.
  • You would be able to select the aesthetics of your ship part line from a number of different choices, like luxury, utilitarian, military, etc.
  • You would be able to design and sell your own ships, sending resources from your mining outposts to your staryard to manufacture whole ships from scratch.
  • NPCs would start spawning with your own ship designs, and you could also assign ship designs to your player faction.
• M-Class parts to make capital ships would be finished, fleshed out, unlocked, and functional, and have their own perk tier.
• The exploration would be actual motherfucking exploration; not just wandering around for its own sake, but actually documenting everything in a growing database and using your findings to advance the tech tree.
• There would be unusual and exotic biotech armor and weapons that could only be developed and obtained by the player, from analyzing plants, animals, and exotic minerals and using their crafting ingredients.
• The main quest would actually center on exploration, wilderness survival, jury-rigging your ship, and so on, and not urban social intrigue. Exploration wouldn't just be going from Point A to Point B scanning everything along the way. There would be full-fledged expeditions that slowly, piece by piece, uncover the geological and paleontological history of the planets you visit.
  • It wouldn't be as simple as just running up to a POI plunked on procedurally-generated terrain and scanning it. These would be actual EXPLORATION MISSIONS. You'd be diving in mile-deep caves, wending your way through canyons, running across glaciers and avoiding falling in crevasses, et cetera. These missions would have exploration-relevant dialogue and your followers would comment on your findings and you could have conversations with them about it.

This is just what I would have preferred to play. Other people's opinions on the matter may differ.

 

[ParadiseLost]

The core game here has a lot of fundamental flaws. There are a lot of things that I, personally, would have done differently, from a design perspective.

Spoiler: Giant Bulleted Starfield Wish List

• First of all, I would have shitcanned Gamebryo/Creation, with its chugging cell transitions and general inefficiency, and gone with UE4.
• There would have been little to nothing in the way of loading screens. Maybe a slight hitch when entering detailed interiors, but that's it.
• Instead of being a collection of randomly-generated flat planes, the planets would have been actual spheres, like Space Engineers, KSP, No Man's Sky, Empyrion, Elite: Dangerous, Star Citizen, etc.
• Planets would not be background objects. As you got closer to them, there would be reentry effects, procedural terrain populated with POIs would appear, and you would be able to land manually on flat enough terrain.
• Planets would be 1:1 scale and millions of square kilometers.
• No invisible walls, period.
• No mandatory fast-traveling using the map, period.
• If you got beyond a certain distance from a zone, it would despawn, to avoid savegame bloat, however, due to the random seed, if you re-entered the same area, it would regenerate the same exact way. Cleared POIs would not respawn immediately; it would take a week of in-game time for them to repopulate with enemies. The way this would work is simple. If the player clears a POI, it sets an invisible flag that tells the engine "don't spawn enemies or loot in this circular zone". If the player fucks off elsewhere for a bit, the flag would eventually time-out and disappear from their save, and enemies and loot would spawn again.
• There would be HUNDREDS OF DIFFERENT POIs. The player would seldom see the same exact POI twice in a single playthrough.
• Atmospheric flight would be possible, but deliberately slow and clunky, to match how un-aerodynamic the ships are, encouraging the player to enter orbit to travel long distances, but ships would be perfectly capable of making short hops of a kilometer or two in a matter of seconds (their top speed in-atmosphere would be capped at about <200 m/s or so, and they would turn like boat anchors; it would feel less like conveniently flying a jet aircraft around, and more like the rocket-powered VTOLs from Highfleet; higher gravity would mean harder landings).
• Travel between planets and systems would NOT be accomplished by selecting them from a menu and fast-traveling. It would have been more like Elite, where you enter Supercruise and actually fly between planets without resorting to a cutscene transition.
• There would be ground vehicles.
  • There would be rocket-powered bikes, but they wouldn't be like speeders from Star Wars or the jet bikes from GTA or Saints Row. They would be more like rocket VTOL flying platforms that are more fuel tank and tubular frames than anything else, and flying them around would be kind of like playing Lunar Lander.
  • There would be tracked mini-tanks with machine guns.
  • There would also be power armor Exoframes, with extensive customization, like Fallout 4.
• You would be able to go on spacewalks with either your suit on, or with your power armor, by exiting an airlock or an Exoframe Bay.
• You would be able to board enemy ships while wearing power armor, but with a catch; you would need a specialized power armor bay and a drop pod launcher. Your pod would destructively pierce the enemy ship's hull and render it inoperable, and then you'd have to spacewalk back to your ship and re-enter via the power armor bay. You would only be able to loot the enemy ship's interior, not fly it around, due to the damage from the boarding.
• Drop pod launchers would also be perfectly capable of dropping you onto a planet from outside the atmosphere, with cool reentry effects.
• You would be able to call your ship in to land on autopilot (or have your crew pilot it) to pick you up, if you were separated from your ship for any reason (like No Man's Sky).
• You would be able to heavily customize robot followers like in Fallout 4's Automatron DLC.
  • Botmaster builds centered on siccing robot followers on enemies would be viable.
• There would be extensive cybernetic augmentations; not just neuroamps, but full-on prosthetic limbs with different attributes and such.
• If you sustained sufficient injuries in combat, your limbs could be amputated by an enemy attack, like in Kenshi. If you run into some space pirate with a big-ass gun, he absolutely could blow your leg clean off your body and force you to apply a tourniquet and crawl back to your ship half-dead.
• There would be nasty Gears of War-ish executions that you could perform on crippled or downed enemies, but they could also do the same to you if you're downed/crippled.
  • A Crimson Fleet asshole could come right up to your flailing ass with your leg shot off, kick the gun out of your hand, taunt you, and execute you in a gory cinematic second-person camera turnaround.
  • Enemies in video games are more interesting when you're actually given a reason to hate their guts, because they make it personal. Take the Zirax from Empyrion, for instance. They actively hunt you down. They send drones and troop transports to blow up your base. Every POI raid is a harrowing experience. You actually grow to despise them and just plain want to exterminate them from every corner of the universe.
• Location-based damage would work both ways, of course. In other words, it would be much like Fallout 4 (except with the added twist of de-limbed players/enemies surviving with a bleed-out effect).
• Enemies would have levels and perks and such, but there wouldn't be any special Legendary Enemies that are extra bullet-spongy minibosses. All human characters would be on a level playing field, and you'd be able to judge their combat effectiveness just by seeing what armor they're wearing and what weapon they're holding. The bullet sponge enemies would pretty much exclusively be monsters.
• The enemy AI would be way, way smarter and more aggressive to compensate. They would actively and intelligently make use of cover, aggressively push up on wounded or reloading players, make effective use of grenades, and be aware of their friendlies and coordinate assaults with them.
• There would be no loot rarity system or legendary effects. Every gun and piece of armor would have a fixed tier instead of that Diablo colored loot tier bullshit (i.e. Gun X is Gun X, there isn't a Magic Super Slaughterer Epic 12-Gauge Shotgun you can get in the endgame that does 10x as much damage as one you get near the start of the game).
• The player wouldn't be railroaded into wearing an ugly piece of armor with weak stats just because it has a few legendary effects on it, or forgoing the bonus to wear armor with better baseline stats but common tier.
• To compensate, there would be a much larger variety of weapons and armor, and their stats would correspond with their appearance.
  • "High-tier" guns wouldn't be high tier by virtue of being leveled or having loot rarity. Instead, a gun that does several times more damage than a regular anti-materiel rifle would be a visually oversized, heavier, rarer weapon that fires like 25mm cannon rounds or something.
  • Any bonus stats that could be applied to armor or weapons would be applied by modding/crafting only.
  • Weapon mods would be true-to-life. It wouldn't be ArmA-level realistic, but it wouldn't be counterfactual, either. Mods that lighten weapons would increase recoil, not decrease it, for instance. Also, each mod would only affect the stat that makes sense for that particular attachment. (Comps/Brakes would only affect kick, not accuracy. Barrel lengths would realistically affect muzzle velocity. Barrel profiles would affect accuracy. A big drum magazine would actually decrease recoil by increasing weight, etc.).
• There would be optional, fully-functional survival mechanics where you would absolutely need food and water and have limited fuel for your ship, Exoframe, vehicles, and boost pack.
• All of the un-fun bullshit inventory management would be completely stripped out. Crafting resources would be weightless like Cyberpunk 2077, subject only to a numeric cap.
• Resource containers in outposts would not have their own chest-like inventories. They would simply increase the numeric cap of the resource stockpile accessible to the player, while the player is standing within the outpost's area of effect.
• There would be none of this nonsense of linking containers together manually or having outpost link pads pile up with excess resources. If you build an outpost link, it would automatically link the stockpiles of all the outposts in the system (or in the game, with the inter-system ones), and you would gain access to all your other stockpiles immediately (i.e. outposts would instantly and invisibly share their stockpiles and resource caps, without any shuffling of weighted items around between containers; it would be abstracted and stress-free).
• You would be able to build resource containers on your ships, but these would only be for mining resources with your ship or moving resources in bulk to sell. They would be separate from the cargo containers used to carry loot, misc items, products, etc.
• If you didn't have such containers on your ship, your resource inventory would be limited to just your character's cap, and you would be restricted to hand-mining.
• The character resource cap could be increased with perks.
• You would be able to modify your ship with specialized asteroid mining, gas extraction, and liquid extraction equipment, and you would be able to land your ship directly on top of resource fields and extract them directly to the bulk resource containers on your ship.
• All ground chests would be infinite, to allow players to easily and conveniently dump excess cargo so they aren't forced to turn their ships into massive freighters just to carry a few hundred guns around that they have no way to quickly get rid of.
• There would be a reverse-engineering system where you could take weapons and armor to the workshop, break them down, and, eventually, receive blueprints.
• You would be able to manufacture any weapon or armor piece in the game yourself, from raw materials, so long as you had the blueprints. This would help give outposts a purpose.
• There would be a lot more outpost building prefabs to plunk down. You could practically build a luxury house in the middle of nowhere.
• You could also turn outposts into settlements, removing them from your outpost cap but also removing them from your direct control and having settlers live and work in them autonomously. Essentially, these locations become trade posts you can always visit and pick up rent money/radiant quests from.
• New Atlantis and Akila would both have been about five times larger, and the tram ride would let you stand inside the tram and watch the scenery go by.
• NPCs would be more reactive, instead of not even giving a shit about you discharging a firearm at their feet.
• NPC headtracking of the player in crowds would not be nearly as aggressive.
• Characters wouldn't look like waxy friggin' Madame Tussaud's sculptures.
• The subtitles would have actually 100% matched the dialogue and wouldn't be ridden with typos.
• Ships would not be arbitrarily limited to being <80m long. Instead, there would have been starport facilities for larger ships, and the largest of ships would have to use flat terrain outside a city instead of landing at the starport. Instead of your ship size being limited by infrastructure, it would just limit where you can land.
• You absolutely would be able to build a massive 300+ meter long capital ship and populate it with dozens of crew members (the crew cap would not be set by a perk, but solely by how many control stations there are on a ship).
  • All ships would be tail-sitters instead of belly-landers.
  • There would be realistic orbital mechanics.
  • There would be realistic Newtonian space combat like I-War or Children of a Dead Earth where you can overshoot an enemy and end up kilometers off-target.
  • Oh god, I just want a real Expanse game.
• Every hab module on your ship would be functional and have a purpose. Infirmaries would be used for treating the wounded, science labs would allow you to actually examine plant and animal samples and make discoveries, etc.
• For those wanting a more viable pacifist/humanitarian route, there would have been an entire faction dedicated to search-and-rescue missions, where your goal would be to answer distress calls, fix people's ships, evacuate stranded people and treat their injuries, etc.
  • There would be an Exoframe attachment with a welder specifically for doing spacewalks around stranded ships and repairing them by hand.
  • You would also be able to do this to your own ship.
• Ships would not be repaired by using a consumable from the cockpit. They would only be manually repairable either by walking around them on the ground and going over the damage by hand with a welder, going on a spacewalk and doing the same, or flying them to a technician and paying a fee. However, to compensate, shields would have much shorter recharge delays, such that shields are not one-and-done damage buffers that are depleted at the start of a fight and never regenerate, but can actually regenerate mid-battle.
• Even smaller ships would still be combat-viable in dogfights, with sufficient skill.
• There would be much larger space battles with dozens of ships flying around.
• There would be a Risk-style political map and an invasion system akin to Mount & Blade.
  • Players would be able to take part in faction invasions to seize territory from pirates, spacers, et cetera, which would turn over territory to the invading faction, if successful.
  • You could join the UC or FC and raid enemy strongholds for them as part of recurring radiant quests for money, but there would also be a player faction and you would be able to plot invasions, hire mercs (or bring along your own followers as a group) and seize territory for yourself.
  • These missions would involve squad-based combat where you have at least a dozen followers and have to tackle big, well-defended enemy strongholds with lots of sentry guns. They would have an artificially raised follower cap, in the sense that once an invasion is planned, you would meet up with everyone you sent on the invasion and they would all follow you around, but only within a certain distance of the objective (no dragging a dozen followers elsewhere).
  • Invade enough strongholds in key locations, and you can take over a whole planet.
  • Taking over a planet will reduce the number of raids on your outposts and settlements and confer various other productivity bonuses, if it's your own faction, or confer a flat monetary reward and increased favors from the established factions if you helped them with one of their invasions.
  • Factions would try to reclaim lost territory, and you'd be able to repel enemy invasions, too.
  • The invasion mechanic would also apply to space stations and space battles.
• There would be a real economy with fluctuating prices, and players would actually have an incentive to make and sell manufactured goods for profit. You could play Starfield like it was X3:TC or Avorion if you wanted to.
• Players would be able to build stations from modules, up to and including their own staryard.
• There would be an entire questline centered around the player going into business as a shipbuilder, with Walter mentoring you at first, but then perhaps growing envious of your success partway through depending on your choices, but then coming back around to respecting you as a competitor, etc.
  • You would be able to select the aesthetics of your ship part line from a number of different choices, like luxury, utilitarian, military, etc.
  • You would be able to design and sell your own ships, sending resources from your mining outposts to your staryard to manufacture whole ships from scratch.
  • NPCs would start spawning with your own ship designs, and you could also assign ship designs to your player faction.
• M-Class parts to make capital ships would be finished, fleshed out, unlocked, and functional, and have their own perk tier.
• The exploration would be actual motherfucking exploration; not just wandering around for its own sake, but actually documenting everything in a growing database and using your findings to advance the tech tree.
• There would be unusual and exotic biotech armor and weapons that could only be developed and obtained by the player, from analyzing plants, animals, and exotic minerals and using their crafting ingredients.
• The main quest would actually center on exploration, wilderness survival, jury-rigging your ship, and so on, and not urban social intrigue. Exploration wouldn't just be going from Point A to Point B scanning everything along the way. There would be full-fledged expeditions that slowly, piece by piece, uncover the geological and paleontological history of the planets you visit.
  • It wouldn't be as simple as just running up to a POI plunked on procedurally-generated terrain and scanning it. These would be actual EXPLORATION MISSIONS. You'd be diving in mile-deep caves, wending your way through canyons, running across glaciers and avoiding falling in crevasses, et cetera. These missions would have exploration-relevant dialogue and your followers would comment on your findings and you could have conversations with them about it.

This is just what I would have preferred to play. Other people's opinions on the matter may differ.

Do you want a magic flying unicorn with that order?

 

[Typhonis]

One reason why the UC lost may be because it is smaller than Chyenne and Neon. The FC is simply bigger and stronger than the UC. Because I can't think of anyplace in the UC that is as important as New Atlantis.

 

[willdelve4beer]

One reason why the UC lost may be because it is smaller than Chyenne and Neon. The FC is simply bigger and stronger than the UC. Because I can't think of anyplace in the UC that is as important as New Atlantis.

I got the impression that Londinion (sic?) was supposed to be the rough equivalent to New Atlantis, or at least much closer to it in size than Gagarin, New Homestead, or Cydonia. I really think losing Londinion is what made the UC decide to stop fighting.

 

[Typhonis]

Haven't been to Londinion yet. Where is it?

 

[ParadiseLost]

Haven't been to Londinion yet. Where is it?

It's a ruin. The entire city was overrun and destroyed by terrormorphs. Forgot which planet it was on. You'll visit it as part of the Vanguard Quest line.

If you try visiting it beforehand, the Vanguard tell you to fuck off.

 

[Typhonis]

THAT planet. OK I know where it is. I sometimes use the system so I don't have to deal with Jemisen.

By the way is their a planet called Armstrong or Gregarian?

 

[willdelve4beer]

there is a... moon? Gagarin in alpha centauri system. Haven't come across an Armstrong.

 

[Typhonis]

I thought there would be one given he is the first person to set foot on the moon.

 

[willdelve4beer]

I thought there would be one given he is the first person to set foot on the moon.

There might be one, I have not come anywhere close to exploring the whole map. That noted, they seemed to lean more to scifi writers than scientists and astronomers (though there are certainly plenty of both being named-dropped for system and world titles). As for astronauts proper - Gagarin is the only one I've come across.

 

[ThatZenoGuy]

X_X
God the terrormorphs were a letdown.
It'd be nice if they were a repeated 'villain' (given that they are apparently sapient?) throughout the game.

 

[Iconoclast]

Do you want a magic flying unicorn with that order?

... yes.

Yes, I do, as a matter of fact.

 

[JagerIV]

The core game here has a lot of fundamental flaws. There are a lot of things that I, personally, would have done differently, from a design perspective.

Spoiler: Giant Bulleted Starfield Wish List

• First of all, I would have shitcanned Gamebryo/Creation, with its chugging cell transitions and general inefficiency, and gone with UE4.
• There would have been little to nothing in the way of loading screens. Maybe a slight hitch when entering detailed interiors, but that's it.
• Instead of being a collection of randomly-generated flat planes, the planets would have been actual spheres, like Space Engineers, KSP, No Man's Sky, Empyrion, Elite: Dangerous, Star Citizen, etc.
• Planets would not be background objects. As you got closer to them, there would be reentry effects, procedural terrain populated with POIs would appear, and you would be able to land manually on flat enough terrain.
• Planets would be 1:1 scale and millions of square kilometers.
• No invisible walls, period.
• No mandatory fast-traveling using the map, period.
• If you got beyond a certain distance from a zone, it would despawn, to avoid savegame bloat, however, due to the random seed, if you re-entered the same area, it would regenerate the same exact way. Cleared POIs would not respawn immediately; it would take a week of in-game time for them to repopulate with enemies. The way this would work is simple. If the player clears a POI, it sets an invisible flag that tells the engine "don't spawn enemies or loot in this circular zone". If the player fucks off elsewhere for a bit, the flag would eventually time-out and disappear from their save, and enemies and loot would spawn again.
• There would be HUNDREDS OF DIFFERENT POIs. The player would seldom see the same exact POI twice in a single playthrough.
• Atmospheric flight would be possible, but deliberately slow and clunky, to match how un-aerodynamic the ships are, encouraging the player to enter orbit to travel long distances, but ships would be perfectly capable of making short hops of a kilometer or two in a matter of seconds (their top speed in-atmosphere would be capped at about <200 m/s or so, and they would turn like boat anchors; it would feel less like conveniently flying a jet aircraft around, and more like the rocket-powered VTOLs from Highfleet; higher gravity would mean harder landings).
• Travel between planets and systems would NOT be accomplished by selecting them from a menu and fast-traveling. It would have been more like Elite, where you enter Supercruise and actually fly between planets without resorting to a cutscene transition.
• There would be ground vehicles.
  • There would be rocket-powered bikes, but they wouldn't be like speeders from Star Wars or the jet bikes from GTA or Saints Row. They would be more like rocket VTOL flying platforms that are more fuel tank and tubular frames than anything else, and flying them around would be kind of like playing Lunar Lander.
  • There would be tracked mini-tanks with machine guns.
  • There would also be power armor Exoframes, with extensive customization, like Fallout 4.
• You would be able to go on spacewalks with either your suit on, or with your power armor, by exiting an airlock or an Exoframe Bay.
• You would be able to board enemy ships while wearing power armor, but with a catch; you would need a specialized power armor bay and a drop pod launcher. Your pod would destructively pierce the enemy ship's hull and render it inoperable, and then you'd have to spacewalk back to your ship and re-enter via the power armor bay. You would only be able to loot the enemy ship's interior, not fly it around, due to the damage from the boarding.
• Drop pod launchers would also be perfectly capable of dropping you onto a planet from outside the atmosphere, with cool reentry effects.
• You would be able to call your ship in to land on autopilot (or have your crew pilot it) to pick you up, if you were separated from your ship for any reason (like No Man's Sky).
• You would be able to heavily customize robot followers like in Fallout 4's Automatron DLC.
  • Botmaster builds centered on siccing robot followers on enemies would be viable.
• There would be extensive cybernetic augmentations; not just neuroamps, but full-on prosthetic limbs with different attributes and such.
• If you sustained sufficient injuries in combat, your limbs could be amputated by an enemy attack, like in Kenshi. If you run into some space pirate with a big-ass gun, he absolutely could blow your leg clean off your body and force you to apply a tourniquet and crawl back to your ship half-dead.
• There would be nasty Gears of War-ish executions that you could perform on crippled or downed enemies, but they could also do the same to you if you're downed/crippled.
  • A Crimson Fleet asshole could come right up to your flailing ass with your leg shot off, kick the gun out of your hand, taunt you, and execute you in a gory cinematic second-person camera turnaround.
  • Enemies in video games are more interesting when you're actually given a reason to hate their guts, because they make it personal. Take the Zirax from Empyrion, for instance. They actively hunt you down. They send drones and troop transports to blow up your base. Every POI raid is a harrowing experience. You actually grow to despise them and just plain want to exterminate them from every corner of the universe.
• Location-based damage would work both ways, of course. In other words, it would be much like Fallout 4 (except with the added twist of de-limbed players/enemies surviving with a bleed-out effect).
• Enemies would have levels and perks and such, but there wouldn't be any special Legendary Enemies that are extra bullet-spongy minibosses. All human characters would be on a level playing field, and you'd be able to judge their combat effectiveness just by seeing what armor they're wearing and what weapon they're holding. The bullet sponge enemies would pretty much exclusively be monsters.
• The enemy AI would be way, way smarter and more aggressive to compensate. They would actively and intelligently make use of cover, aggressively push up on wounded or reloading players, make effective use of grenades, and be aware of their friendlies and coordinate assaults with them.
• There would be no loot rarity system or legendary effects. Every gun and piece of armor would have a fixed tier instead of that Diablo colored loot tier bullshit (i.e. Gun X is Gun X, there isn't a Magic Super Slaughterer Epic 12-Gauge Shotgun you can get in the endgame that does 10x as much damage as one you get near the start of the game).
• The player wouldn't be railroaded into wearing an ugly piece of armor with weak stats just because it has a few legendary effects on it, or forgoing the bonus to wear armor with better baseline stats but common tier.
• To compensate, there would be a much larger variety of weapons and armor, and their stats would correspond with their appearance.
  • "High-tier" guns wouldn't be high tier by virtue of being leveled or having loot rarity. Instead, a gun that does several times more damage than a regular anti-materiel rifle would be a visually oversized, heavier, rarer weapon that fires like 25mm cannon rounds or something.
  • Any bonus stats that could be applied to armor or weapons would be applied by modding/crafting only.
  • Weapon mods would be true-to-life. It wouldn't be ArmA-level realistic, but it wouldn't be counterfactual, either. Mods that lighten weapons would increase recoil, not decrease it, for instance. Also, each mod would only affect the stat that makes sense for that particular attachment. (Comps/Brakes would only affect kick, not accuracy. Barrel lengths would realistically affect muzzle velocity. Barrel profiles would affect accuracy. A big drum magazine would actually decrease recoil by increasing weight, etc.).
• There would be optional, fully-functional survival mechanics where you would absolutely need food and water and have limited fuel for your ship, Exoframe, vehicles, and boost pack.
• All of the un-fun bullshit inventory management would be completely stripped out. Crafting resources would be weightless like Cyberpunk 2077, subject only to a numeric cap.
• Resource containers in outposts would not have their own chest-like inventories. They would simply increase the numeric cap of the resource stockpile accessible to the player, while the player is standing within the outpost's area of effect.
• There would be none of this nonsense of linking containers together manually or having outpost link pads pile up with excess resources. If you build an outpost link, it would automatically link the stockpiles of all the outposts in the system (or in the game, with the inter-system ones), and you would gain access to all your other stockpiles immediately (i.e. outposts would instantly and invisibly share their stockpiles and resource caps, without any shuffling of weighted items around between containers; it would be abstracted and stress-free).
• You would be able to build resource containers on your ships, but these would only be for mining resources with your ship or moving resources in bulk to sell. They would be separate from the cargo containers used to carry loot, misc items, products, etc.
• If you didn't have such containers on your ship, your resource inventory would be limited to just your character's cap, and you would be restricted to hand-mining.
• The character resource cap could be increased with perks.
• You would be able to modify your ship with specialized asteroid mining, gas extraction, and liquid extraction equipment, and you would be able to land your ship directly on top of resource fields and extract them directly to the bulk resource containers on your ship.
• All ground chests would be infinite, to allow players to easily and conveniently dump excess cargo so they aren't forced to turn their ships into massive freighters just to carry a few hundred guns around that they have no way to quickly get rid of.
• There would be a reverse-engineering system where you could take weapons and armor to the workshop, break them down, and, eventually, receive blueprints.
• You would be able to manufacture any weapon or armor piece in the game yourself, from raw materials, so long as you had the blueprints. This would help give outposts a purpose.
• There would be a lot more outpost building prefabs to plunk down. You could practically build a luxury house in the middle of nowhere.
• You could also turn outposts into settlements, removing them from your outpost cap but also removing them from your direct control and having settlers live and work in them autonomously. Essentially, these locations become trade posts you can always visit and pick up rent money/radiant quests from.
• New Atlantis and Akila would both have been about five times larger, and the tram ride would let you stand inside the tram and watch the scenery go by.
• NPCs would be more reactive, instead of not even giving a shit about you discharging a firearm at their feet.
• NPC headtracking of the player in crowds would not be nearly as aggressive.
• Characters wouldn't look like waxy friggin' Madame Tussaud's sculptures.
• The subtitles would have actually 100% matched the dialogue and wouldn't be ridden with typos.
• Ships would not be arbitrarily limited to being <80m long. Instead, there would have been starport facilities for larger ships, and the largest of ships would have to use flat terrain outside a city instead of landing at the starport. Instead of your ship size being limited by infrastructure, it would just limit where you can land.
• You absolutely would be able to build a massive 300+ meter long capital ship and populate it with dozens of crew members (the crew cap would not be set by a perk, but solely by how many control stations there are on a ship).
  • All ships would be tail-sitters instead of belly-landers.
  • There would be realistic orbital mechanics.
  • There would be realistic Newtonian space combat like I-War or Children of a Dead Earth where you can overshoot an enemy and end up kilometers off-target.
  • Oh god, I just want a real Expanse game.
• Every hab module on your ship would be functional and have a purpose. Infirmaries would be used for treating the wounded, science labs would allow you to actually examine plant and animal samples and make discoveries, etc.
• For those wanting a more viable pacifist/humanitarian route, there would have been an entire faction dedicated to search-and-rescue missions, where your goal would be to answer distress calls, fix people's ships, evacuate stranded people and treat their injuries, etc.
  • There would be an Exoframe attachment with a welder specifically for doing spacewalks around stranded ships and repairing them by hand.
  • You would also be able to do this to your own ship.
• Ships would not be repaired by using a consumable from the cockpit. They would only be manually repairable either by walking around them on the ground and going over the damage by hand with a welder, going on a spacewalk and doing the same, or flying them to a technician and paying a fee. However, to compensate, shields would have much shorter recharge delays, such that shields are not one-and-done damage buffers that are depleted at the start of a fight and never regenerate, but can actually regenerate mid-battle.
• Even smaller ships would still be combat-viable in dogfights, with sufficient skill.
• There would be much larger space battles with dozens of ships flying around.
• There would be a Risk-style political map and an invasion system akin to Mount & Blade.
  • Players would be able to take part in faction invasions to seize territory from pirates, spacers, et cetera, which would turn over territory to the invading faction, if successful.
  • You could join the UC or FC and raid enemy strongholds for them as part of recurring radiant quests for money, but there would also be a player faction and you would be able to plot invasions, hire mercs (or bring along your own followers as a group) and seize territory for yourself.
  • These missions would involve squad-based combat where you have at least a dozen followers and have to tackle big, well-defended enemy strongholds with lots of sentry guns. They would have an artificially raised follower cap, in the sense that once an invasion is planned, you would meet up with everyone you sent on the invasion and they would all follow you around, but only within a certain distance of the objective (no dragging a dozen followers elsewhere).
  • Invade enough strongholds in key locations, and you can take over a whole planet.
  • Taking over a planet will reduce the number of raids on your outposts and settlements and confer various other productivity bonuses, if it's your own faction, or confer a flat monetary reward and increased favors from the established factions if you helped them with one of their invasions.
  • Factions would try to reclaim lost territory, and you'd be able to repel enemy invasions, too.
  • The invasion mechanic would also apply to space stations and space battles.
• There would be a real economy with fluctuating prices, and players would actually have an incentive to make and sell manufactured goods for profit. You could play Starfield like it was X3:TC or Avorion if you wanted to.
• Players would be able to build stations from modules, up to and including their own staryard.
• There would be an entire questline centered around the player going into business as a shipbuilder, with Walter mentoring you at first, but then perhaps growing envious of your success partway through depending on your choices, but then coming back around to respecting you as a competitor, etc.
  • You would be able to select the aesthetics of your ship part line from a number of different choices, like luxury, utilitarian, military, etc.
  • You would be able to design and sell your own ships, sending resources from your mining outposts to your staryard to manufacture whole ships from scratch.
  • NPCs would start spawning with your own ship designs, and you could also assign ship designs to your player faction.
• M-Class parts to make capital ships would be finished, fleshed out, unlocked, and functional, and have their own perk tier.
• The exploration would be actual motherfucking exploration; not just wandering around for its own sake, but actually documenting everything in a growing database and using your findings to advance the tech tree.
• There would be unusual and exotic biotech armor and weapons that could only be developed and obtained by the player, from analyzing plants, animals, and exotic minerals and using their crafting ingredients.
• The main quest would actually center on exploration, wilderness survival, jury-rigging your ship, and so on, and not urban social intrigue. Exploration wouldn't just be going from Point A to Point B scanning everything along the way. There would be full-fledged expeditions that slowly, piece by piece, uncover the geological and paleontological history of the planets you visit.
  • It wouldn't be as simple as just running up to a POI plunked on procedurally-generated terrain and scanning it. These would be actual EXPLORATION MISSIONS. You'd be diving in mile-deep caves, wending your way through canyons, running across glaciers and avoiding falling in crevasses, et cetera. These missions would have exploration-relevant dialogue and your followers would comment on your findings and you could have conversations with them about it.

This is just what I would have preferred to play. Other people's opinions on the matter may differ.

On planetary scale, I think it should actually be the opposite. Skyrim is roughly 1-1000 size scale to what Skyrim the province canonically actually is, and as I recall that did give a fairly good ratio of sense of scale and density of stuff.

1-1000 scale of planetary surface area for an Earth like planet would still be 500,000 square km^2 of area, 150,000 km^2 of land. This is in comparison to Skyrim's roughly 30 km^2 of ground. So its still an immense amount of land.

This would still be a world with a roughly 400 km wide. Which would be "only" 30x smaller. But, walking arround the equator, if you could, would still take 16 days. More than enough to have a sense of a massive world, and Kerbal shows worlds at this scale still feel like worlds. No Man's Sky gets by with worlds under 100 km wide.

And at the most extreme end, Outer wild shows you can have planets that still feel pretty planety with basically all the worlds being under 1,000 m.

Probably for gameplay purposes, a planet shouldn't take more than 30 minutes, maybe an hour to cover. If limited to walking, this would be a circumference of 2 km, or about 600 m wide. Which just so happens to be outer wild scale. 30 minutes by car or jetpack, lets say 100 km/h would be roughly 50 km circumference, or about 15 km wide. Round up to 20 km wide, and a planet would still have a 1,200 km^2 surface area. Which is a very big map overall: some 40x larger than Skyrim's map.

10 km radius would be a distance to the horizon of 200 meters, which is actually very good for game purposes. This would still be a world thats 99% empty: you'd have about 1 km^2 of content, and 1,000 km^2 of filler.

But, if Earth like planets were "merely" 100 km wide, that's still 30,000 km of surface area, and the horizon is 450 m away, probably more than you would generally notice in a game. For earth this would be a bit more than a 1/100 scale on planetary diameter, and 1/16,000 scale of land.

Moon would be roughly 30 km wide, have a surface area of 3,000 km^2, and horizon would still be 250 meters, far enough to give decent vision.

That gives a lot of practical space, but gives much fewer completely empty space, so the density of stuff can be much higher. 100 planets averaging 10,000 km each would still be 1 million square km, which is a ridiculous amount of territory. But, its a much more manageable amount compared to even the entire US. If you designed 100 different biomes, thats a lot, but not impossible, but doable, and each one would average about 10,000 km^2 of space. Much of it would be fairly repeatable space filling territories.

Just about every atmospheric world would have some level of ice caps. Frozen wastelands you can probably get away with pretty minimal variation between worlds, and that would fill in lots of territory. Oceans likewise can probably fill in lots of surface area, and not require that much variation between planets.

 

[Sergeant Foley]

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[willdelve4beer]

Has anyone encountered any in-game lore/explanation for the background of the Ecliptic mercenaries? They seem like Talon Company/Gunner In SPACE!, but I'm hoping there is more to it than that.