this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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They're procedurally generated, but I never got a whiff of them being randomly generated. Are you sure? And even if they were, it's not incompatible with environmental storytelling if those things are components in their model for generating environments.
The terrain isn't but the POIs are randomly placed. When you open the scanner and see things like "man-made structure" or "cave" or whatever; those are all random and won't be in the same place for every new game.
Gotcha, I didn't know that, but I guess it feeds into their new game plus mechanic. To be clear, I don't believe that stuff sucks because it's random; it sucks because it was poorly crafted. You can do good environmental storytelling even when the environment is determined by RNG (Dwarf Fortress and Shadows of Doubt both do), and you can have manual, hand-crafted content that sucks (like every non-faction quest in Starfield...why are we still doing thoughtless, boring fetch quests in 2023?!).
The side quests definitely were also lacking. Like, I know there's only about 4 archetypes of quests (fetch, escort, kill and checkpoint) that you can really do, but you make them interesting with the story and reasons for doing the thing. Starfield really just made a majority of quests "go get this mcguffin because we need mcguffins," with nothing really cool or interesting about it.
DF was 100% designed around telling a story using RNG. Game is like a mad lib. Starfield didn't go that far (most games don't). I actually do not ever expect AAA games with procedural generation to do more than just give you endless repetition over randomness that generate compelling and unique "stories" the way DF or RimWorld do.
One of them was literally just to press 4 buttons and then talk to a guy again. I don't know who at Bethesda thought these quests were even worth putting in the game.
"Just hit them randomly until the door opens!"
I don't know if they wanted to be funny or if even the designers themselves just employed the puzzle because it doesn't need logic to be defeated if you just keep mashing buttons at random. lol