I just typed out a few notes during the showcase so I will put them here for discussion.
- There are over 1000 world. These are procedurally generated but have handcrafted content placed randomly on them.
- Every you see exists and all planetary objects can be visited.
- Illumination is changing based on the atmosphere and the sun type/proximity.
- Animation system and combat system has been reworked from the ground up.
- You can play in 1st or 3rd person.
- Resources exist and are collectable
- You can find enemy camps on planets and/or other random things/locations.
- You can fast travel to your ship.
- You can have companions that aid you on the ship or on ground.
- Visual style for the tech was called by devs as Nasa-Punk as in advanced but worn
- You can choose landing spots on a planet or fast travel to an existing one.
- You jump drive to other systems and can upgrade drive for longer jumps.
New Atlantisis the biggest city Bethesda ever created. There are more cities:- Akila city: Western style. Looked like RDR2.
- Cydonia city: Mining city built for resources.
- Neon: Known as Pleasure city. Cyberpunk style.
- There is a mythical group called Constellation. They are the last explorers of humanity and are looking for answers to long lasting humanity’s questions. Your main story revolves around them I think.
- Character creation is vastly improved and it’s extensive. Mocap used for the making.
- You choose one of 40 (employee) presets and then put more details from there.
- You choose your background and skills. Chef was an example. Your skills affect interactions in the game.
- You can have up to 3 traits and each has pros and cons.
- You get 1 skill per level and you can rank up skills.
- 5 skill trees with 4 ranks per skill. Jetpack, mind-control and Neurostrikes(heavy strikes) shown. Great build diversity.
- They studied data from NASA to strike balance between realism and fun.
- There is dogfighting in space
- Ships are highly customizable and upgradable down to rearranging modules around.
- Can hire crew members with different skills
- Ship has a power allocation system(think of an Equalizer style thingie). You can reallocate power according to situation. Shields and weapons for combat or engine for escaping, etc.
- There’s a trait that lets you target specific subsystems on an enemy ship.
- You can destroy ships and loot them or board them and capture them for your fleet.
- You can commit piracy on friendly ships.
- You can build a outpost and produce resources from animals.
- You can build outposts, assign companions to them and keep producing resources. You can decorate outposts and live there.
- Guns are highly customizable down to type of ammo. Melee weapons exist. Miniguns shown.
- Gravity changes with each planet.
- Firing in 0g can push you back.
- Photo mode exists.
Please feel free to add any details I missed.
edit: Here is the full showcase(45 minutes) for people who want to watch it.
Holy shit man. This is some diligent note taking. Thanks
Thanks I tried to gather as much as possible to spark discussion in here and gauge expectations.
Let’s see how people feel about the game.
Seriously thank you for this! The notes were extremely helpful for me. I’m staying cautiously optimistic that a couple months after release we will have a stable game worth playing.
I’m staying cautiously optimistic that a couple months after release we will have a stable game worth playing.
Yes, I’m the same exact boat. I prefer to wait and play a better game. Bad initial experiences are hard to shake.
Idk if the end result lives up to what I expected or hoped, I can usually get past a rough launch. No Man’s Sky and both division games are still among my favorites
I’m still wondering what kind of inter system or “one location to another on the same planet” functionality exists, tbh. Also Todd mentioned being able to visit a gas giant in the background but what does that mean? Flying through the atmosphere? Floating colonies? Or did he just mean it like “visit the rings” type of deal?
Can I just fly from one random spot on a planet to another? There’s still so many questions about how travel mechanics work in a game without a persistent flight to space mechanic like NMS or Elite.
The game is already a top seller on steam… People don’t learn.
Yeah, and they’ve already announced DLC that isn’t far off. So just content they cut to sell i imagine.
That’s really put a sour taste in my mouth about the whole thing
Expansions/DLC usually doesn’t work like that.
You’re thinking more of the on disk day-1 dlc like mass effect 3. Usually Bethesda games will add new places and questlines to do which is usually out of scope for 1.0
You forgot the real biggest news, the return of the Adoring Fan!
Very impressed with the showcase and this jumped to the top of my list of games for 2023. Still won’t pre-order it and am expecting a classic buggy Bethesda launch experience.
After the past 2 years I’m definitely going in cautiously with anything owned by MS. GamePass is decent, but their studios have been whiffing it lately.
No need to preorder if you have gamepass
am expecting a classic buggy Bethesda launch experience.
I am too. I will probably be buying it after 1-2 weeks when bugs are ironed out and reviews show it in a positive light.
Well shoot. Im sure it’ll be a glitchy mess, but dang thats gonna be fun.
As a No Mans Sky preorder and day 1 player [to this day], it can’t be that bad.
Now I just want more info on that watch
I too pre ordered NMS and didn’t refund it, I even really liked it day one, though I admit there wasn’t a ton to do
It looks like this will have a few things I’d love to see in NMS, but also yeah it’ll probably be extremely buggy
I look forward to seeing what the modding community does
I’m extremely skeptical. What they showed today is ENORMOUSLY ambitious- it looks like they are aiming for an Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen kind of experience, and both of those games have been actively worked on for over a decade now and don’t have all of these features.
The only other game I can think to compare this to is No Mans Sky- which completely failed to deliver most of what it promised on day one- but has implemented everything and then some in the years since.
Like, what they are saying is VERY cool, but of the three games that I can think to compare it to, one of them is still deep in development (and the story mode has never materialized, depsite years of RSI saying it’s right around the corner), one was a complete disaster on launch, and one of them has been consistently good but still isn’t feature-complete with everything they want. Elite Dangerous only added an on-the-ground FPS mode in 2021, and the general consensus in it is that it was quite lackluster.
This game is promising to have good on-the-ground FPS/TPS gameplay, good ship-to-ship combat, multiple ways to engage with the game’s economy which are viable (like trading, being a mercenary, piracy, mining), an extreme level of ship customization, and presumeably multiple ship types that work best for each of the “professions” like trading and fighting. And also a story. And 1000 procedurally generated, planet-sized planets.
That is as much if not more than what Star Citizen promised, and Star Citizen still doesn’t have half of the features. It’s WAY more than No Man’s Sky promised, and we all know how that turned out- even with what NMS now has in the game, this is more ambitious by a lot because of the graphics they are promising, the customization of ships, and the physics model (NMS is newtonian, but it doesn’t really play that way).
And it’s bethesda- they’re known for making good games, but they have never made anything even remotely near this ambitious before. Their games are renowned for being buggy messes on release. And they want to release this on fucking consoles, which makes it even more difficult.
That’s true - and I was extremely skeptical. However, after seeing the Direct GAMEPLAY and noticing a tangible improvement in the game over the course of a year…I have upgraded myself from extremely skeptical to somewhat skeptical. There was just way too much shown in the Direct for me to have as many doubts as I did before. Had a Direct never been shown and we got another short gameplay peek with cinematics - I would be ringing the bells of doom for this game.
I’m so extremely excited for this game. I love everything they showed, but the ship building especially looks fun. As a huge Elite Dangerous fan, lots of this looks absolutely amazing.
Yesterday, me and my husband watching the stream, he was getting too excited.
I kept telling him to calm down because we’ve been burned before by our own hype. No use though can’t lower that man’s hype on this one lol.
I just assume that what they show isn’t as good as they’re making it seem and any mechanic they didn’t showcase might not even exist. If there’s anything we’ve learned from developers it’s that they’ll claim literally anything in as vague terms as possible to generate hype and then when it comes out they’re all “Oh well we never said you could go to a gas giant, when we said ‘you could visit that too’ what we meant was fly up near it and see the rings…” Etc.
As few specifics as possible, so that when people get mad about the lack of content they can claim it was you misinterpreting them.
This will have waaaaay too many mechanical bugs and glitches.
And I will love it.
Over 1000 worlds sounds cool, but will they be kind of “uniquely” interesting? My fear is that gameplay/world wise everything will feel redundant after a while.
I want this game so bad, I can’t remember the last time I was this excited for a game. I really hope it doesn’t suck.
Has there been any mention of mod support?
Since this is a bethesda game I expect it to have full mod support. Or at the very least, they will probably not put artificial roadblocks for mod devs.
Can’t wait to see The Spiffing Brit show us how it is a perfectly balanced game with no exploits
I am super excited seeing the game in motion. But procedurally generated content just really bums me out.
I just don’t see it turning out any other way except as hollow weirdly disjointed planets.
Will it use CreationKit?
