Bad/misleading title. The article (actually just a regurgitation of a podcast interview) is about the design & layout differences between two specific cities: New Atlantis in Starfield and Diamond City in Fallout 4.
Basically just this one designer saying he didn’t like the design of New Atlantis compared to his own work.
Purkeypile explained that Starfield’s main city, New Atlantis, was the “antithesis” of Fallout 4’s Diamond City.
Baity clicks are still clicks. Very shitty behavior from the site.
“I didn’t work that much on that city,” Purkeypile explained. “I worked on Akila and Neon a fair amount, but New Atlantis, I wasn’t really involved in that much. But I got lost in that all the time when I tried to play the game too it’s so big and Diamond City, you can see, is kind of like the antithesis of that like sprawling city thing.”
There, everything anyone checking needs to read
It’s a good point tho, DC is compact and designed that way with a solid lore reason.
NA should be more spread out lore wise, and it is.
The big mistake was having the navigation pathing direct you to fast travel station to move about the same map. So if you tried to walk places in NA, it was likely to make you walk to the closest fast travel point, even if it’s in the opposite direction. Which prevents players from learning the map and getting lost when they realize what’s happening and don’t want the loading screen for fast travel.
Like, I agree with the guy, but it’s not a design problem, it’s a pathing problem.
Wait… his name is actually Purkeypile? I remember playing through fallout 4 once and I looked through the list of names Codsworth recognized… and Purkeypile was one of them. I named my character that and made him the most dapper man in the wasteland “Missta Purkeypile…”
I wonder if they put that in there because of him.
Seems odd to claim that an action game with RPG elements is the complete opposite of the RPG genre itself…
But eh, it is their oppinion, not fact.
Developing a game and experiencing a game are 2 very different things. Having developed games in the past, things can be similar on the surface but everything about how it was made can be completely opposite. At one point we had free reign to work on whatever, and then it changed to daily focuses. That’s a huge change in the experience of developing and completely opposite of the game before.
That is a very fair point that I didn’t consider
