Yeah - of course games are hard - but all he did was rough out a planet-to-space experience in Unreal Engine with a Starfield aesthetic. If he started trying to build an actual game on it... Well an 8 year timeline doesn't seem crazy.

It's what you see like 70% of the game.

I just know what she's saying too "we you have a free moment i need to talk to you"

he had them record at 16x speed then just slowed it down in post. pretty impressive

Yeah, but the SEO rewards anything with the word "Starfield" in it at the moment and there's enough people seemingly invested in putting down the game at every opportunity that they'll share this around and drive clicks.

And it's demoing something Elite Dangerous has had for years.

Elite Dangerous too. I was really disappointed when I lauched Starfield and learned there wasn't any seamless landing for exploring planets. It was a huge bummer to me.

Star Citizen as well. The game is ludicrously unfinished for how long it's been in development IMO, but it does have that at least.

I think Bethesda "fanboys" (like myself) just really like the core experience (warts and all) I play NMS when I want to lose myself in a beautiful seamless scifi setting and i play starfield when my focus is on engaging with faction and character storylines and some campy space encounters. I kinda like how janky bethesda games can be, reminds me of playing tabletop RPGs and all the weird janky shit that happens in those games too. I like that I can be the golden boy of the crimson fleet and still join up with the freestar rangers. I make up a little story for my character and act it out and have a lot of fun doing so.

The only thing I could do without is the loading screens. I don't mind that landing on a planet isn't seamless, but i mean... loading screen to get on ship, loading screen to get into space, loading screen to fly to different planet, wait until scan finishes, loading screen to land on planet.

That's the worse part for me. If it was just a short cut scene for landing on a planet, I think that'd be 100% fine.

I just don't see atmospheric entry/exit as being that important to my immersion, yes it was kind of cool the first time you did it in NMS, seven years ago, but it got old fairly quickly even in that game. I'm happy for Starfield to have a more ME like set up and focus on other areas of the game.

They have working ladders in Starfield. They finally did it.

They do have ladders in Starfield, actually

I think the problem is also that Bethesda doesn't really "do" vehicles, probably due to engine limitations.

Usually, it's just horses or "passenger" travel (like when you man the guns in FO4 birds). I guess one could maybe consider power armor in FO4 to be kind of like a "vehicle", but it works more or less the same as just walking around.

Oh, there is dragon riding in Skyrim, but it's a mess and you don't have that much control.

I'm surprised the engine can even handle space combat, honestly. And 360° movement as well, which would have been great for dragon riding in Skyrim. But most of the dragons in TES are dead, so we probably won't get proper dragon riding in whatever TES: VI is.

(Sidenote about dragon riding/combat: Before Larian delved further into CRPGs, they made a regular third person RPG where you could play as a dragon. It was actually pretty fun. Still didn't have full control, and it was only in certain sections, but it was entertaining. Divinity II: Director's Cut, in case anyone's interested. Don't know how well it's aged, but I enjoyed it a few years ago.)

No, just that there are no invisible walls. After 7 hours of flying, she reached a paper-cutout of the planet.

You can fly in space towards the planets you can see. When you get there, you won't be able to land and will be able to fly straight through the planet itself.

Planets outside of the fast travel menu aren't really planets

The engine works by having square areas of playable in-game sections called cells. Unless the devs created enough cells between planets, and have them in the same world space, for a player to travel in that's not possible.