Starfield is an ambitious video game that highlights the vastness of space and encourages the gaming community to go beyond the final frontier. Players are impressed with the insane attention to detail; however, the game is far from perfect and one critical detail was severely overlooked for an immersive experience.
Modern triple-A video games feature the best the gaming industry has to offer. From the visuals, graphics, narrative, and everything else under the sun, most open-world games must feel lived in by countless people to amplify the player experience, these NPCs must have realistic routines and cycles like in life.
The Gaming Community Is Bothered by the Unrealistic Depiction of Npcs in Starfield
Director Todd Howard had a vision of a massive video game that takes place on more than one planet and somehow, he and his team achieved that goal while encountering a few hurdles throughout development. New concept art of an underwater planet in Starfield has surfaced and it is a testament to the ambitious nature the game developers had in mind for this project.
The reason behind the omission of an underwater planet and its creatures not making it to the final cut is unknown, and there is no telling as to whether the game developers still intend to add them in a future update. Players were impressed with the concept art and are eager to see it in the game one day, along with some improvements in lackluster areas like the daily life of NPCs.
NPCs never sleeping and having no homes is the biggest realism problem in the game.
byu/SpaceDantar inStarfield
Most NPCs in modern open-world video games like Red Dead Redemption 2 are quite detailed, and the developers of Rockstar Games thought of everything, especially the shopkeepers have a realistic nightly routine like closing shops and opening at first light. On the other hand, the shopkeepers in Starfield embody unhealthy and unrealistic behavior of staying awake and manning their shops 24/7.
The game is renowned for the themes of space exploration; however, it lacked one feature that could have been a massive game-changer. Airlocks are notably missing in the game and adding it in a future patch could encourage the gaming community to notice other interesting details from the game to distract them from the unhealthy habits of shopkeepers and give them more freedom.
Bethesda Game Studios Greatly Undermined the Routines of Starfield NPCs
Howard has been working in the industry for years and is usually a man focused on the details, so how this one escaped his attention is interesting, if understandable with the scope of Starfield. The director did earn some points for the details found in the spacecraft and credited the talent of Istvan Pely for pulling it off seamlessly.
It would have been nice if the developers gave the NPCs the same level of attention. The gaming community wanted to be engrossed in the world and immerse themselves in how the people would act realistically. It may not be game-breaking, but it can be distracting to walk up to a shop and purchase items realizing the keeper has no life, let alone any personality.
It detaches the player from the game and makes them feel hollow for interacting with a character meant to stay awake. Perhaps the developers could improve in that regard before the Shattered Space expansion.
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