Will Starfield be empty ?

What’s boring in acting ? Acting

Let’s do it in Blender

Waiting for Starfield

This second short was done before the release of Starfield. It was made under the following premise : Starfield will have the same flaws and Strength as Skyrim but will have extra problems due to the announced size of the game (over 1 000 planets)

The result will be a mostly empty game with shallow gameplay mechanics

On the other hand, as for Skyrim, the exploration will be on point and the game will feature a few amazing planets that will compensate and provide a great experience overall

A complex short

Original ship design

The cute toyish voluntary toyish look has been discarded for an unvoluntary toyish look in the final design

Another discarded planet

The second empty planet was supposed to be this one before Maswin suggested to use the No Man's Sky trailer instead. This was made before choosing the black design for the in-game character

Discarded empty planet

It was looking horrible

A lot more content

In the first short everything happens inside the same store. This short features a lot of completely different environment that needs to be done even if they only appear for few seconds

This short is therefore focused more on modeling, shading and environment art that animation; which are not my specialties but skills I aim to aquire

I also modeled the spaceship on my own (which is why it looks like a toy)

Analysis

Self critique

Original design of the last shot

The lowest effort city

Daylight

The idea of using the night to hide the problems was terrible. It looks better during the day but highlights all the problems

Looking a bit more futuristic

The shot just looks better overall. It's still ugly tho

Now this looks decent

The city looks fine but also extremely small

Skyscrapers

With extra buildings the shot is starting to look cramped

Complete change of scale

This was supposed to be a money shot but it looked either small or cramped. Starting over

Adding the first structures and plants

A lot better than the previous design

Fixing the composition

Moved the tree to the left

More and more buildings

The sense of population is there but it feels cramped and still has a small city look

Accepting the small town look

Fixed the composition a again. I accepted the small city look and made it look less cramped

The final shots tend to be noisy. The spaceship looks extremely plasticky, almost like a toy. The first planet seen from space reflects light way too much giving it a “fake” feel. The shots on the planet are way too narrow which would make the understanding of the story harder. Botstar has no facial animation and relies entirely on sound; he would have benefited from being able to show emotions on his face. The grass doesn’t look like grass. In the shot with the plane landing the mountain does not look like a mountain. When Botstar looks at the city; the city looks a lot more like village. A train passes too but the scale is completely off, which would make the train bigger than the buildings themselves. Some frames did not render properly and a “Media offline” message appears

Overall a good short. I would rate it at 6.5/10.

I was wrong

Starfield did not unfortunately turn out the way I expected. There were indeed empty planets and the handmade places did turn out much better; on the other hand there wasn’t enough of them to make the game be great overall. Bethesda did not play to its strengths