I know a lot of people hate this kind of feature, but there are significant reasons why I think it would make Starfield better.
If I’m not wearing one and I leave my ship, I start taking damage if the planet is dangerous. The only way around that is to be in 3rd person while in the ship (aside from the workaround below). There isn’t any indication anywhere as to whether or not you are in a spacesuit, besides your menu and 3rd person view. There is no way to know while maintaining immersion.
Bethesda’s workaround is to auto-hide spacesuits and helmets in atmo. This sucks, because I personally like tailoring the look of my character to the environment. But more importantly, I want to know that I am wearing a pressure suit if I’m out in a dangerous environment. I don’t want it to feel like I’m a freecam wandering around – I want to feel like I’m slogging along in a freaking spacesuit.
What’s really strange is: if you put on the broken Constellation helmet, you can see the tape piece from the inside. It has an overlay! Sadly this works for no other helmet. Did they just abandon making the textures?
A similar annoyance with a related system: the quick menu does not unequip items. This would make it super easy to change between a spacesuit and regular outfit and not deal with more menus.
I figure there will be a mod at least for helmet overlays eventually, but damn is it frustrating that they definitely thought about it and only implemented it for a piece of masking tape.
I don’t think the strength of the power armor is something we’re asking. Just an immersive overlay when we’re wearing gear.
The space suits already have a pretty good amount of strength with how much they can be customized and some of the legendary drops are amazing. We already have “mechanized” suits that increase carry weight. If anything, I would just expand on stuff like that rather than making it a very powerful assault system.
Oh yeah, I was just saying that as a short hand. You’d want to pick and choose mechanics to bring over or modify, but OP specifically mentioned wanting to “slog around” implying heaviness or something more than cosmetic or survival necessity from wearing the suit, not that that’s what everybody would want.
With OP’s vision in mind you’d at least want the animations for equipping and unequipping the suit, heavier sound effects, leaving the suit behind by itself or in a rack or locker, extra carry weight, extra modification slots, the visually noticeable but unintrusive helmet overlay, maybe some others, but that gets close to what it seems like they want.
You’d want to balance it somehow so it’s not always a positive to wear if it were some sort of special suit that wasn’t required for zero atmosphere traversal, you could go the fusion core route like 4 or figure something else out.
Yeah it would be fun for it to be a bit more clunky in ways, but I think the way they’ve done gravity is alright with me. I like hopping around on Mars, it’s very cathartic to just jump and float and land and jump and float…
Has anybody discovered heavier gravity planets? Are the heaviest Earth-level like Jemison? That’s the kinda trudge I’m looking for.